


Boat Trolls

by rainbowBarnacle



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Boat Trolls, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/F, Fantrolls, Gen, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:28:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 21,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21620185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowBarnacle/pseuds/rainbowBarnacle
Summary: Your name is ELUSCA PONTOP. You are fond of PAINTING, CRITTERS, and BONECRUSHING HUGS, the latter of which is encouraged by your overly affectionate OCTOPUS MOM. You're KIND OF LOUD and you have the tendency to be sort of OBLIVIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC at times, but you mean well. You MOTHERFUCKING LOVE THE OCEAN. This is only slightly problematic seeing as your JUGGAGODS in their INFINITE HILARIOUS WISDOM made you with a bloodhue that lies somewhere between indigo and purple, leaving you with PUNY GILLS and FUCKED UP TINY-ASS EARFINS. It's all good, though, it's chill, you have a BITCHASS TUGBOAT to be living on, which allows you to go on all manner of FUCKING EPIC ADVENTURES with your moirail/helmsman.THESE ARE YOUR STORIES.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 14





	1. Misery is Six Letters

**Author's Note:**

> (Enkidi Galgal, Pinkie Buglet, and Otterdad are [vastderp's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VastDerp/pseuds/VastDerp) characters, and Bel Kadros is [JumpingJackFlash's.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JumpingJackFlash/pseuds/JumpingJackFlash))

**Elusca Pontop: Regard yellowblooded adult troll out cold in your food prep block.**

After you hauled your new guest aboard and made him comfortable, you spent the rest of the afternoon picking his ship clean. If it didn't blow up like something out of a shitty action adventure vid during the time it took for you to drag its kicking, screaming helmsman onto the _Carla_ , you figured it wasn’t gonna send you to the deeps any time soon.

An hour’s rummaging later, you determined the useful parts of the ship must have broken up and landed elsewhere. No food, no water, but the fire extinguisher and the pair of first aid kits were in good enough condition that your efforts weren’t a total loss.

You had no idea what to make of the electronics—a lot of it was already waterlogged to shit, but you grabbed what you could, stuffing random memory grubs and hiveports and detachable consoles into your modus. You were able to gut a couple of the consoles you couldn’t move, pulling out pieces of things you couldn’t name, but you figured at the very least you could pluck out the precious metal bits and sell them for scrap.

Many of the slimy bioware tentacle garland things were torn to pieces, (and twitching, ew) but you untangled the few that still looked in working condition and added them to your stash. You figured if you didn’t make use of them, your new friend might know what to do with them.

The last thing you took was the Captain’s chair. By then your modus was full and you almost strained your back carrying that fucker aboard, but that thing was so plush it was like sitting in a god’s palm and you always did have a weakness for chairs with wheels on them.

Now it’s dusk and your insomnia shows no signs of abating. You’re miles and miles from the crash, you’ve tidied up what you could of the mess you and your new guest made earlier, and you’ve got fuck all to do except stare at this emancipated scarecrow sprawled out all limp on your table.

It’s hard to believe this is the same creature who bit the shit out of your neck and shoulder not too long ago. Trying to hold onto him was next to impossible—he thrashed hard enough that you almost dropped him in the ocean twice. His struggles were full of false stops where he’d go limp and pant angrily, only to start kicking and bucking the second your grip relaxed. The moment he realized there was shit on your ship that wasn’t bolted down, he proceeded to make every effort to use his psi to throw everything he could directly at your head.

Squirrelly-ass little fuck.

You put a stop to that nonsense by grabbing your _101 Uses For Grubcakes_ cookbook and whacking him a good one upside his deranged little nugbone. His weird crackly eyes went all dark behind his weird goggles and he collapsed like somebody's shitty voodoo doll made out of twigs, and after making sure that his thinkmeat isn't coming out of his ears or anything, you left him to go scavenge. 

Now, looking at him close up, you’re not so sure he's okay.

He’s got weird holes all over him that you didn’t notice before. The bigger ones on his arms have metal plugs on them, but the smaller ones on the backs of his hands are just ugly craters without any kind of cover. They look like they hurt.

His suit is ripped up. You can see another metal plug peeking out just under his collarbone. You peel back the fabric and hiss; he is _covered_ in gooey cuts and scrapes.

“ _Damn_.”

His face is the worst. His lips are bitten all bloody and he’s lost one of the teeth from the row that sticks out between them. There’s a gash going down his face that starts under his right eye and ends almost at his chin—that’s gonna need some stitching for sure.

You bite your lower lip. God, the poor asshole. His cheeks and ears are flushed an angry yellow that means burns. It’s nothing that’ll scar, you think, but you’ve been burned enough times fucking around with welding equipment that you have a pretty good idea of how much that shit must _sting_.

His goggles are cracked across both lenses. Gently, so gently, you pull them off—and oh holy fucking hell one of his eyeballs is popped out, oh gods, oh shitting squittering _fuck_. Your fingers jerk and you drop the goggles on his chest and cover your mouth with both hands.

It takes a second or two for it to click that it isn’t a real eyeball. It’s some kind of metal thing, a fake one they must have put in him. It occurs to you that you don’t know shit about helmsmen or why this one would have a fake eyeball. All you know is this is hideous as fuck; you were never good at dealing with eye squick.

It’s gonna have to come out, though. It’s too far out to put back in right, and the eye itself is missing some of its outer plating. You think replacing it shouldn’t be too hard—you’re pretty sure you saw someone with a bowl of these bionic eye things the last time you were at market.

You’re glad he’s still out cold so he doesn’t have to see you turn your back to him and do a shuddery grossed out dance right there in the food prep block. _Euuuuggghh_.

Okay. Deep breaths. The sooner this shit gets done, the sooner you can patch the rest of him up and then go fix yourself a motherfucking drink.

You stare at your hands until they stop shaking, and then you pull open a drawer and take out a pair of pliers. Maybe if you were lucky it would all come out in one piece and you wouldn’t have to worry about random wires or metal bits causing an infection somewhere you couldn’t reach.

You fit the pliers at the base of the eyeball and pull carefully. Nothing.

“ _Fuuuuuuuuuck_ —”

You grimace and make yourself pull a bit more. There is a smooth, slick giving sensation and you’re aware that your hand doesn’t feel like it’s your hand anymore. You’re floating, dizzy, and your fingertips are tingling.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—”

Then rest of it slides out with a faint wet sound and all at once you’re holding a mechanical eyeball and its stem. You stare at it stupidly. You won the prize, it’s you!

You’re gonna be sick.

You drop the eyeball and the pliers into the trash bin and spend the next few minutes hunched over the sink until you’re sure your legs can hold you up. Boy, wouldn’t it be funny if he woke up now, with you dry heaving and shuddering all over.

You’re relieved to find he’s still unconscious when you approach the table again, that bruised, empty socket looking all sad and droopy.

That won’t do. But it’s not like you have an eye patch or anything to cover it up with.

Inspiration strikes. Dialing up your modus, you remove an impulse purchase from the last time you were at market: a small plastic bag of small rubber balls you meant to give to your lusus as ablution toys.

You pick one out and wash it first with rubbing alcohol, then with water, before easing it into the empty socket. You are surprised and delighted to find it’s a perfect fit.

You picked this one specifically because it’s orange, which you think complements his natural eye color. There’s also a tiny smiley face where his pupil should be.

That ought to cheer him up some.

You take in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Being a docterrorist was fuckin’ _hard_ , and you still have so much more to do.

You notice one of his smaller horns is chipped and wince, _awww_ , that’s gonna hurt like fuck when he wakes up. Your brows furrow. Did that happen during the crash or when you clocked him with the cookbook? You can’t remember.

Either way, it’s a damn shame. The longer you look at it, the sadder you become. Poor skinny fuck, he’s all lopsided now. There’s something downright tragic about seeing that little nubbin with the tip all jagged and the crack down the middle; it would never match its tiny rightways brother again.

He’s just a bundle of bones, really. It’s easy to see that now, with him being all still and quiet. Frail as anything. You watch his narrow chest rise and fall and remember how you could feel him hyperventilating when you carried him over. The way he carried on, you would’ve thought he thought you planned to serve him with salad and eat him raw.

Poor thing must have been scared shitless.

The thought makes your chest tight. Even though he’s taller than you, the urge to fold up his long, bony limbs and cradle him against you is so strong it aches. You want to tuck him away somewhere dark and secret so the universe can’t shit on him no more. You want him to tell you everything, purge his little bloodpump clean, and when he’s done you’ll wrap his soul up in so many bandages he’ll forget what it’s like to hurt.

In short, you’re so pale for this troll it’s stupid.

Snickering at yourself, you remove the first aid kit from your modus and rummage around. Inside you find disinfectant, wet wipes, burn cream, bandages, gauze, needles, painkillers, and a precious six ounce bottle of horn cream. You’re going to have to make that shit last until you can find more, or you might have to get creative with engine putty and epoxy tape.

You crack your knuckles and smile down at your new diamond bro.

You have work to do.

Some hours later, you’re putting a kettle on the thermal hull when your buddy finally stirs. By now he resembles a scrawny mummy where you got a bit thorough with the gauze, but at least you’re pretty certain your stitching is decent. He emits a thin, hoarse groan and squints at you.

“Hey brother,” you say. “Grubcake?”

**Helmsman Galgal: Fondly regard semi-conscious landscape.**

Conscious thought comes back to you in gauzy fragments. This realization in itself is a surprise--you weren’t expecting consciousness, not after you sent the Sunslammer and its inhabitants hurtling planetward for a surprise seaside jaunt. The last thing you remember is blinding lights, the sting of smoke in your throat, the glorious crescendo of dozens of sirens and alarms, the frantic, futile machinations of your crew, and then your Captain--oh _fuck_ yes, this is the best part--huddled beneath his desk with his hair and eyebrows on fire and his soiled pants split along the asscrack.

Even here, now, floating in this befuddling colorless cloud, you feel a tingly wave of vindictive satisfaction warm you all over.That image, you think, is something that’s yours, an exclamation point on the end of your lifespan, a last fuck-you to an uncaring universe, something to take with you into the dark and whatever else awaits beyond it.

Your only problem is that you have no idea what or where _this_ even _is_.

Slowly, you put yourself together. Your name is Enkidi Galgal. You are eleven sweeps old. You used to be a troll, before the upgrades. You’ve spent most of your life since then hooked up to biowires, receiving hard knocks from your subroutine nanny and getting your nutritional goop from a feeding bag. Now you are a banged up, displaced bit of machinery, unhooked, useless. Back to being just meat.

You should, by all intents and purposes, be _cold_ meat.

You are not cold meat. You are cocooned from legitimate wakefulness, capable of thinking only in dozey snatches, but you are here, and you are you. You know this because the meat can feel pain. It comes from very far away, but it’s getting closer by the minute. 

There’s some part of your brain blaring _ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR_ , but against all odds, you are very much alive.

For a pumpbeat or two, you are incredibly frustrated. That was supposed to be _it_ , your big ending, and now existence marches on with all of its loose ends and abrupt, anticlimactic conclusions. If your murder-suicide was a book, you’d throw it across the room in disgust.

Then the panic sets in. You’re alive. You’re in pain. That means you can feel. That means you can be punished. They can punish you for a long time before they kill you. If they kill you. They can turn you into a screaming torso, blind and deaf to the world save for when they sent orders directly to your brain. They can put your thinksponge in a box and keep you alive and awake for sweeps, and there you would be until some clot or burnout finally, finally ends you. 

“... _rrroooootheeerrrrr, grrrruuuubcaaaake?_ "

Oh god. Bits of you are coming back online. You try to curl yourself away from the pain, the increasingly intelligible sounds, the distant but unmistakable sensation of someone touching you, but it’s no use. The cloud dissipates, leaving you lying on your back and staring uncomprehendingly at a ceiling you’ve never seen before.

You’re seeing it out of one eye, because the good one is broken. Not offline. Broken. You’re certain of it. There is absolutely no input coming from it, no infrared, no electromagnetics, no stream of info from its interface telling you minutiae about your environment. Your entire head is silent, in fact. No information, no orders, no subroutines. Nothing but your own pulse all thick and sluggish in your ears. For a second or two, disgust overpowers the rising panic. You can _hear_ your blood . _Gross_.

So your camera eye is a dead bit of metal in your gross meat eyesocket now. You roll the other eye wildly, trying to identify something, anything that might tell you where you are. Nothing looks familiar. Nothing even looks _sensical_ , and the longer you try the more frightened you become. 

Then you can’t ponder the mystery of the ceiling any more than that, because now there’s nothing shielding you from the pain, and your pain comes in many flavors: burns, scrapes, bruising, sprains, damaged tendons, and you’re pretty sure at least a few of your fingers are broken. Your ports are inflamed. It hurts when you breathe. It hurts when you swallow. It hurts when you curl the gross meaty toes you suddenly have instead of starship parts.

But the worst of it overshadows the rest--a constant throbbing, nauseating _ache_ radiating down from your horns and into your braincase. It’s a deep, intimate kind of pain, and dread churns in your guts as the extent of your injuries begins to dawn on you. Words flit through your mind: Cracked. Pulverized. All the way down to your nubs. Damaged keratin, rotten cores. Infected nerves. _Amputation_. 

It’s a pain that means trouble. It’s a pain that means maintenance, the bloody surgical kind. 

Oh, what did you _do_ to yourself?

The sound of someone puttering around turns your blood to ice, and you go utterly still. Light, cool fingers touch you. Some new technician? You flinch and try to writhe away, but all you can manage is a weak twitch. Every muscle in your body shrills in protest and for a moment all you can do is close your eyes against the pain.

You breathe. There is talking, but you’re too out of it to discern what they’re saying, only that it doesn’t sound immediately threatening. Do you know them? They don’t sound like any of your mechanics. It _couldn’t_ be one of your mechanics because your mechanics are at the bottom of the ocean now, where _you_ should be.

Then they’re gently dabbing at the tears that squeezed past your lids with a soft cloth, and this unnecessary little act, this gentleness, lights a bright, insane rage in you. You just crashed an entire fucking spaceship and this person is babying you like you’re a lost little foundling mewbeast and _who gave this no rank having tendril jockey the right to **EVER** touch Imperial hardware?_

You emit a strangled snarl and bite at the nearest thing. This is hard; lunging upward hurts like a motherfuck and they’re on your blind side. At first your teeth only catch briefly on skin, but then you move again, your neck arching so that you strike like a viper, and this time your teeth sink home.

“ **FFFUCK**.” says the weirdly familiar voice.

You growl deep in your throat and clench your jaws harder, grinding in your teeth. You taste thick salt blood. You’re sure you have their wrist, you can kind of feel their fingers twitching near your face, the arm jerking as they try to recoil away, but no answering strike comes. 

Slowly, you roll your eye up to look at their face. You take in the long, branched horns, the finned ears, the tiny transparent seadweller teeth, the unmistakable white and gray facepaint. She looks back at you, trying gamely to turn her agonized grimace into something resembling a reassuring smile.

You are up to your gums in Highblood. Without really thinking about it, you move to grip her arm tightly with both hands, like a woofbeast with a bone.

“H-h-heeeyy, hey now!” she says shakily, all bright, false cheer. Underneath it, you sense an unmistakable attraction toward you, compelling and tender and deeply worried, (not for herself, but for _you_ ) and somehow you know--you just _know_ \--that she would let you bite her fucking arm off before she’d hit you for it.

She pats your cheek, and it’s only because you already have your jaws clamped down that you don’t try to snap off a finger. “Shhhshshshsh, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, you ain’t got nothin’ to fear, you’re safe with me, I ain’t gonna do you any kind of harm, okay? Just-- _ngghhk_ \--just you leggo and relax yourself, baby, this hurts like hell!”

You decide that you hate her. 

This merry painted hellgod worshiping fuck doesn’t _know_ what it’s like to hurt like hell, but you’ll make sure she does before she inevitably kills you. You are going to bite crescents into every inch of her skin until you hit bone. You’re going to _throw_ her, bounce her off the walls and ceiling, and then you’re going to claw and punch and hit and bite and bite and bite and bite, and it won’t be even a fraction of what you’ve been through from the likes of her, but you’ll do your best to give as much of it back as you can to this baffling, infuriating, STUPID idiot fuck who would drag you back to unwilling life and _smile_ at you like that, you hate it so much, you hate it, you **_HATE_ **\--

Searing pain behind your eyeballs. For a split second you even feel it in the dead camera eye. It’s enough that your jaw wrenches open again, and you scream as your resurrected subroutine gives you the spanking of your life. Shocks crackle through you, you inexplicably smell peppers and blood, and when it’s all over, you’re on the floor, your head in her lap as she pets your hair and murmurs nonsense things over and over. Her arm is bleeding freely, but she doesn’t seem to care about that right now.

Your gross flesh bulb of a nose is bleeding. You’ve bitten your tongue. Your bloodpump is doing a fluttery, jittery dance in your ribs. You’re pretty sure that if you hadn’t already voided all the sustenance in your body, this latest punishment would have had you puking and shitting simultaneously. Your fingers keep spasming, locking up, then spasming. From far away, you can see your legs and feet twitching gently, like someone doing a soft shuffle dance.

It’s then that you notice that, at some point, this sadistic woman wrapped you almost entirely in gauze from head to foot.

“Hey baby, you with me? Just you breathe. It’s all gonna be okay.” Chilly fingertips brush your bangs off your forehead, mindful of your horns. “I see you, brother. Whatever had you out there, it ain’t gonna get you in here.”

_I’m in hell,_ you think, and pass out.


	2. {{Captain's Log}}

Latitude: 36°28'57.42"N

Longitude: 29°47'15.50"W

Date: The 2nd bilunar perigee of the 2nd dark season

_Safety Equipment:_

Fire retardant foam canisters - Operational [X’M NOT MAKXNG THE OBVXOUS JOKE AND YOU CAN’T FORCE ME. >>8P]

Flare Kits - Fully stocked [WHY THEY ALSO XNCLUDE NOVELTY SPARKLERS XS BEYOND ME.]

Trauma Kit - Fully stocked [ATTENTXON LL: A BOX OF RAXNBOW ADHESXVE MEDXCAL STRXPS AND A TWO SWEEP OLD SAMPLER BOTTLE OF PEPPERMXNT SCHNAPPS DOES NOT CONSTXTUTE A FUCKXNG TRAUMA KXT. THE STRXPS DON’T EVEN STXCK PROPERLY.]

Life Vests: 3 [RXGHT, GREAT, ONE FOR YOU, ONE FOR ME, AND ONE FOR THE CREEPY-AS-FUCK SAFETY DUMMY TO LURE AWAY THE SHARKS THAT ARRXVE TO NXBBLE OUR TOES. DON’T THXNK X DXDN’T NOTXCE THAT XT LOOKS LXKE A LOWBLOOD. GAWKXNG XN HORROR XRL RN AT THE SHAMEFUL HEMOXSM X FORCE MYSELF TO TOLERATE SOLELY BECAUSE A CERTAXN XNDXGO MAKES THE BEST WAFFLES PLANETSXDE. SOMETXMES X EVEN MANAGE TO DXSGUST MYSELF.]

Inflatable Raft - Operational [NORMAL PEOPLE STOCK THEXR LXFE RAFTS WXTH USEFUL SHXT LXKE WATER AND FOOD AND STANDARD GLOBAL POSXTXONXNG DEVXCES, NOT XNSTANT SANGRXA PODS AND A SELECTXON OF CHEERFUL UMBRELLAS. SUMMON THE COAST GUARD SO X CAN OFFXCXALLY REQUEST THAT THEY PUT YOU XN TXME OUT.]

_Alarms:_

Public Alarm System: Functional [WHY THE HELL XS THE PAS A CLXP OF YOU GOXNG ‘OH SHXT WE’RE FUCKED’ AND WAXLXNG THEATRXCALLY. WHAT XS BROKEN XN YOU. WHY EVERYTHXNG. UGH.]

General Alarm - Functional [THXS XS JUST LXKE THE PAS EXCEPT XT’S YOU PLAYXNG “ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRXGHT SXDE OF LXFE” ON YOUR STUPXD THUMB HARP.]

Smoke Detectors - Functional [THEY’RE NOT VERY USEFUL XF YOU KEEP TURNXNG THEM OFF SO YOU CAN COOK FLAME BROXLED GULPER EELS WXTHOUT WAKXNG UP THE ENTXRE OCEAN. MAKE ME SOME NEXT TXME. DXCK.]

_Vessel Maintenance:_

Engine - Functional

Propulsion System - Functional

Steering System - Functional

Electrical System - Functional

[OH, THXS XS A FUCKXNG LAUGH. A NOTE FOR WHOMEVER ELSE MXGHT BE LOOKXNG AT THXS: X AM FAR FROM “FUNCTXONAL”:

  * THXS SHAMBXNG HUSK OF A VESSEL XS ALWAYS ON THE VERGE OF DXSASTER AND X SUSPECT XTS GARXSH HULL HASN’T COLLAPSED SOLELY BY THE GOOD GRACES OF THE OCEANXC HORRORS STUCK ALL OVER XT. X FEAR FOR MY LXFE ON A NXGHTLY BASXS. MORE SPECXFXCALLY, X FEAR THAT XT WXLL GO ON EVEN LONGER.
  * THERE XSN’T AN EVENXNG THAT PASSES WHEN X AM NOT ACCOSTED BY THE CAPTAXN’S OVERLY AMOROUS LUSUS. X DXD NOT SXGN UP FOR MOLLUSK HXCKXES WHEN YOU DRAGGED ME KXCKXNG AND SCREAMXNG ABOARD THXS WRECK. SHE LOVES ME WELL AND X HAVE THE SCARS TO PROVE XT. SERVXCE REQUEST: CONTROL HER, _SXR_ , OR AT LEAST DXSCOVER THE EPXCUREAN DELXGHT THAT XS TROLL TAKOYAKX . ONE MORE SESSXON OF TROLL NETFLXX AND CHXLL MXGHT ACTUALLY PUSH ME OVER THE EDGE.
  * THE DXRT RECYCLER XS SEVERAL SWEEPS PAST XTS PRXME AND SOMETHXNG XNSXDE XT SMELLS LXKE A FART. THXS HUNK OF RUST CONTAXNS LEVELS OF SLOPPXNESS THAT ARE ALMOST XMPRESSXVE. XMAGXNE THE MESSXEST PLACE YOU’VE EVER SEEN. THXS SHXP XS WORSE. THE ABLUTXON TRAP XS A DAYMARE OF SLXMY SKXN PASTE AND SMELLY DECORATXVE HERBAL SOAPS SHAPED LXKE FOOD. EMPTY MEAL CARTONS AND WXNE BOTTLES ABOUND. AND X MEAN EVERYWHERE; X AM TO THE POXNT WHERE X SUSPECT SOME OF THEM HAVE ACHXEVED REPRODUCTXVE CAPABXLXTY.
  * THE THERMAL HULL. OH MY SWEET MORONXC CLOWN GODS THAT DON’T REAL. THE THERMAL HULL. DON’T EVEN OPEN XT XF YOU VALUE YOUR XNNOCENCE. ALONG WXTH A NOTABLE AMOUNT OF FOODSTUFFS THAT HAVE LONG SXNCE FORMED THEXR OWN CXVXLXZATXONS AND GOVERNMENTS, THXS ONE TXME X FOUND ONE OF HER CONCUPXSCENT DEVXCES BEHXND A BAG OF FROZEN SHRXMP. XT WAS A ROSY BLUSHXNG PXNK, WXTH LXTTLE SPARKLES.
  * MY CAPTAXN USES UP ALL THE HOT WATER AND NEVER CLEANS THE TRAP DRAXN OUT AFTERWARD AND X SWEAR HER HAXR GETS EVERYWHERE. ONCE X EVEN FOUND A STRAND BETWEEN MY GLUTEALS. HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN. X BARELY HAVE GLUTEALS AND YET HERE X AM OCCASXONALLY FLOSSXNG THEM WXTH SOMEONE ELSE’S MONSTROUS KERATXN STRANDS??? CULL ME. CULLLLLL MEEEEEE.
  * MY DUTXES, AS LACKADAXSXCAL AS THEY ARE, ARE REGULARLY XNTERRUPTED BY LL’S EVER PRESENT NEED FOR HUGS. SHOULD X WORK ON ALTERXNG OUR COURSE SO WE DON’T GET STRUCK BY LXGHTNXNG? NOOOO, LL WANTS CUDDLES. TRADXTXON HOLDS THAT GLOWXNG FXERY ELECTRXCAL DEATH FROM THE SKXES MAKES A HUG SO MUCH MORE SPECXAL. XN CRAZY WORLD.
  * LASTLY, AND MOST QUESTXONABLY, XS THE FACT THAT SHE SMUGGLED A LEVEL 7 EXPERT CLASS HELMSMAN ONTO HER TUGBOAT AND XNSTALLED HXM XN THE ENGXNE BLOCK. XNSTEAD OF DEEP SPACE JUMPS AND BX-ELLXPTXC MANEUVERS FOR THE EMXPRE, X AM HELMXNG A FUCKXNG EYESORE SEA VESSEL XN THE MXDDLE OF SWEET SALTY FUCKALL AND MY CONSXDERABLE PXLOTXNG SOFTWARE XNCLUDXNG SELF DESTRUCT MECHANXSM AND EMERGENCY XNSXDE OUT CODES REST COMFORTABLY XN THE QUXVERXNG CAFFEXNATED GRXP FRONDS OF A CLOWN WORSHXPPXNG PSYCHOTXC WHO THXNKS SHE CAN HANDHOLD ME XNTO BECOMXNG SOMETHXNG RESEMBLXNG AN ACTUAL FUNCTXONAL BXPEDAL TROLL. X AM THE PUDDLE PADDLXNG COMFORT OBJECT, XT XS ME. THERE ARE BAKXNG SESSXONS. SEND HELP.]



_Other incidents of note_ : medical ( ), cargo escape ( ), predation against staff or vessel ( ), other event (X)

Swimming lessons continue as normal [AND BY “NORMAL” X MEAN SHE THREW ME OVERBOARD, XNTO THE MOTHERFUCKXNG OCEAN--WXTH ALL THE SHARKS AND JELLYFXSH AND HORRXFYXNG BENTHXC CREATURES THAT X DARE NOT NAME--AND SPENT AN HOUR TRYXNG TO GET ME TO WOOFBEAST PADDLE. GUESS WHAT? X CAUGHT A COLD AND X STXLL DON’T KNOW HOW TO SWXM. XT’S A GOOD THXNG X LXVE ON A FUCKXNG BOAT MXLES AND MXLES AND MXLES AWAY FROM ANY LANDFORMS.]

Helmsman Appreciation Night was a noted success [SHE MADE ME AN HONEST-TO-GOD PAPER CROWN. THE CROWN WAS COVERED XN GOLD STAR STXCKERS AND LXTTLE STXCK-ON RHXNESTONE DXAMONDS. SHE MADE ME WEAR XT ALL NXGHT WHXLE SHE PAXNTED MY NAXLS AND LOOKED UP SHXPWRECK VXDEOS ON CRUELTUBE, AND THEN SHE GAVE ME A HORRXFYXNG RAXNBOW CAKE. X HAVE BEEN MANUALLY DXGESTXNG SAXD HELLCAKE FOR THREE SOLXD NXGHTS. (FULL DXSCLOSURE, XT’S BEEN SORT OF AWESOME, BUT X STXLL WANT TO BE YELLXNG SO SHUT UP.)]

Weekly religious function observed [LL PUT ON HER HXDEOUS CEREMONXALS AND X GOT TO LXSTEN TO HER GET HXGH ON STARDUST AND PAXNT THE WHEELHOUSE BRXGHT MAGENTA WXTH GREEN STRXPES. THE NEXT NXGHT’S HANGOVER WAS AMUSXNG AND XNVOLVED EQUAL AMOUNTS OF PRAYXNG TO HER MXRTH-ASS FAYGOT SKY HOBOS. X HAVE REDUNDANT BACKUPS OF THE MULTXPLE AUDXO AND VXSUAL RECORDS OF THXS FUCKERY. XF ONLY X WASN’T PROGRAMMED NOT TO BLACKMAXL THE AOB. OH XF GODDAMN ONLY.]

Floating Market trip next week [XN OTHER WORDS, LL GETS TO SEE THE LOVELY MOONLXT OUTSXDE WORLD WHXLE X RUST AWAY XN MY SLXME NEST WATCHXNG ROMCOMS AND ACHXEVXNG THE PENULTXMATE METAPHORXCAL BASE WXTH THE MOLLUSK. X CAN’T WAXT. MAYBE XF X’M LUCKY SHE’LL BRXNG ME BACK A ROCK OR SOMETHXNG.]

[XN SHORT: THE XNSUBORDXNATXON ON THXS VESSEL XS BEYOND ANYTHXNG X HAVE EVER SEEN, XS ALL X’M SAYXNG. SO BASXCALLY, SXTUATXON NORMAL, NOTHXNG MORE TO SEE HERE. HELMSMAN GALGAL THE FUCK OUT.]


	3. Elusca: Go on a Painting Bender

Outside, the sun is still on its way down, but it’s overcast enough that you’re not in danger of frying. Good.

The deck is still warm under your feet. You approach a bit of wall you’ve been leaving blank for a time like this–there are two other murals packed underneath the layer of thick white paint primer you spent two nights applying, until it got all stuck in your eyelashes and the smell of it lingered and Galley said you were insane.

Maybe so. But you also have a bitching blank canvas to be wreaking havoc on.

You open up your modus and get cracking. Out come your paints and chalks. You arrange the containers neatly. You have an array of sponges and brushes for when your fingers won’t do.

Out come your “paints”. These materials include various containers of blood, pulped berries, thick pulverized flower petals, dyed clays, ketchup, mustard, pesto, orange marmalade, and a collection of pots containing assorted powders you can use to blend different hues together.

You snicker. Once you and Galley got in a screaming match and ended up throwing that shit at each other until you were both covered from horntips to toes in eyesearing splotches of oranges and purples and greens and pinks. You called him beautiful. He called you an idiotic shambling fuck for brains. Your ablution trap never looked quite the same after you two were done with it.

Lastly, you unpack a bag of special stardust. There’s only a bit left; you’ll have to pick up more at the next Carnival.

You sink to your knees in front of your canvas and bow your head.

“Messiahs both, grant me steady hands and clear eyes while I paint this thing, ‘cause I can’t sleep for shit and I can feel you, you’re in my pan and my hands and my eyes all sayin’ ’ _get your fuckin’ paint on, sis, kick the wicked chromaticity_ ’ and when you come calling you are straight up undeniable that way. See through me, my beloved Brothers, speak through my fingers, sing me your rage and your love and may my pigmentations ever please you.”

You flick the last of your special stardust in your face.

And with that, you’re fuckin’ _gone_.

When you come back to yourself, you are dripping up to your shoulders in rainbow streaks. Your leotard is a complete mess. It’s under your claws. It’s drying in your hair. It stings in little cuts you didn’t know you had. Your mouth tastes like grit and copper–you look down at your hand and notice you bit your fingers and palm hard at one point to draw out your bright blood.

Several containers are knocked over. There’s paint and powder everywhere. Somewhere in the middle of all that you smeared your face all over–you can feel it mostly dried now, the heavy powdery thickness of it caked on and making creases when your mouth stretches into a huge grin.

Your canvas isn’t blank now. You have absolutely no idea how any of that got there but _fuck_ is it ever pretty. Anyone walking in on it wouldn’t have any kind of idea what you were even trying to do, it looks like pure randomness, complete color chaos, wild streaks of paint like you just fought a battle.

But you, you know what every stroke and thumbprint means.

In the bottom right corner blazes your signature in your own wicked violet-blue.

“Oh,” you moan hoarsely. “ _Oh_ , that’s good shit.”

You collapse.


	4. Dear Galley,

This thing I have, where I hear critters thinking and shit in my head, it’s nice most the time.

Once I got myself this wicked concussion and couldn’t hear any kind of critter for, like, a day or so and it was disturbing as fuck. The world ain’t oughta be that quiet, not ever.

The things I hear, man. You don’t even know.

Like mom, you ever look at mom? How she’s all to be curled up in the tub playing with a Mr. Tuber™ and being as cute as hell? She’s all quiet inside. Peaceful. She loves to _love_ , that’s all she’s for. Let her wrap some motherfucker up in a hug and she just fuckin _glows_. I can’t even comprehend living life without hearin that.

So I go out, and sometimes it’s hard not to lose hours just listening to this shit. Like, jellyfish are fuckin _weeeird_ , bro, they’re all staticky, haha, kinda like you. It’s nice, though, if you’re careful. Once I rowed through a giant cloud of'em and there was all this white noise in my head.

Or anemones, god, those things are motherfuckin beautiful. I mean, they got all kinds of colors and pretty drifty shapes goin’ for'em, but listen in on'em and it’s just, wow. It feels… like when you’re swimming, and the current picks you up just right so you don’t gotta worry about your balance or do anything but float. ‘Cepting it’s in your head.

Sometimes this hearing thing, though, it ain’t always easy to deal with. I wouldn’t give it up for anything, but some nights, man, I hear the most fucked up shit.

Like, sometimes I'll be floatin' along on my boat, minding my own goddamn business, and then some sharkbeasts or sommat get all up into a feeding frenzy somewhere nearby, and before you know it insteada tinkering with the radio or takin' inventory or any of the other shit I'm supposta do that night, I'm sittin' all alone in my food prep block tearin' through a raw cholerbeast steak just because those feelings all up and _take over_ and I need somethin' to _bite_. or sometimes some critter kicks the wicked shit, and I hear that too. like, their last thoughts and impulses go all incoherent, and there's these flashes of pain and random colors. All those last-minute spasms and reactions....and then just nothing. Dead quiet, awful _nothing._ I goddamn _hate_ hearin' things die. And don't even get me _started_ on mating seasons, bro. 

It took me a long, loooong time to figure out how to deal with shit like that. These days it don't take me unaware so often, but _some nights_ , man.

Like once, way before I found you, there was this blubberbeast all by herself. That kind, they usually only go off alone like that when they’re pregnant. She’ll have a calf in the dim season, and then while that calf is growing up, the two of them make their way back to the home pod so mom can spend the dark season with some other flushstud to be making more babies with, heheh.

But this one, I didn’t see no calf swimming with her. And she was singing, these long, low screams that I hadn’t never heard before. I could hear in her head too, she was torn up something fierce inside…

Then I notice she’s kinda nosing this limp pale thing, and it dawns on me that’s her calf, and it ain’t moving at all, and I ain’t hearin nothing from it, and she’s still poking it up to the surface so it can breathe.

Fucked me up something awful. I couldn’t get out of my coon for almost a week.

So yeah. It’s like that all the time. Just, all kinds of teeny critters and giant ass creatures all to be living and eating and fighting and fucking and sleeping. You back it up some and let all that hit you at once and it’s like a heartbeat, Galley, I can hear the pulse of the world.

And that’s why I forgot to buy more honey flavored Raging Lusus. I’m sorry, bro.


	5. Galley: Observe the greatest story ever told.

Your moirail has an uncanny talent for messaging you during the most inopportune moments possible.

You’re trying to focus on the climatic scene between the doomed ship’s captain and the oxygen starved helmsman. The captain is incoherent with indignant fury, the helmsman’s euphoric comm broadcasts growing more and more muddled and riddled with typos and sprays of telltale binary. It’s a scene that never fails to punch you right in the protein craw, especially when the camera zooms in on the helmsman’s face and catches that fucked up smile in the moment right before the final explosion rips the hull apart and sucks all the air out of the helmsblock. There are sparking consoles and warning lights reflected in her goggles, but something in the tilt of her head suggests she no longer sees them, and it’s such a tired, _relieved_ smile…

The music swells, and in the privacy of your block you don’t feel self-conscious about mouthing her last words along with her: “My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”

The troll Nicki Minaj quote is one you’re depressingly familiar with. Helmsman fiction enthusiasts are acquainted with the phrase and would without question interpret her last words as a bittersweet farewell to stars yet unvisited, planets and solar systems yet uncolonized, a peaceful surrender to the ideal dream of dying honorably in the line of duty.

The phrase has been reclaimed, of course, by those of you actually dangling from biowires. Whispered ironically in secret comlines and private messages, it is a seed of hope, the dangerous and defiant thought that there is more beyond your miserable service to the Empire, that you are singular and whole and _apart_ from the role assigned to you.

In your adolescence there were days those words made you feel like you could pilot through a black hole and back. These days those words only make you terribly small and sad, because in some ways your situation planetside wears on you worse than it ever did in space. Here you’re a joke stranded in the middle of the ocean, a useless fuck giving joyrides to a clown worshiping cretin—

Familiar text flashes across your vision and you miss your favorite part: the moment where, ice crystals crawling up her skin, gazing off at nothing, she _chuckles_ before sagging limp in her wires...

**-lackadaisicalLimpet [LL] began trolling bustedCrankshaft [BC]-**

BC: JFKDL;SFAXSK WHAT

BC: THE FUCK 

BC: DO YOU WANT.

LL: bro

LL: bro cmon out of your block

BC: FUCK YOU, X AM OTHERWXSE ENGAGED.

LL: you been in there for like three nights man 

BC: X ALSO HAVE ACCESS TO TXME MEASUREMENT DEVXCES. YOUR POXNT?

LL: my point is being i dont know how you can even stand being in there

LL: its gotta be hotter n fuck and you know i cant be fixign the cooling unit till all this other shit gets done

BC: GO PLAY OUTSXDE OR SOMETHXNG. THE GROWN-UP XS WATCHXNG HXS STORXES.

LL: you mean youre abusing yourself to that titanic grubvid again

LL: brother its gonna fall off if you dont let it rest some

BC: OH MY GOD STOP TALKXNG ABOUT MY BULGE

BC: FORGOT TO ADD: YOU DEPRAVED LUNATXC. FURTHERMORE, GO AWAY.

LL: aint nothin doing

LL: now get your lack of an ass out here before you fuckin suffocate

BC: THAT’S A BXG SHXNY NEGATXVE FROM ME.

LL: do you want me to come down there

BC: AT WHAT POXNT XN THXS EXCHANGE DXD X GXVE YOU THE XMPRESSXON X WANTED COMPANY

LL: cause i will

BC: GROSS. NO.

LL: i’ll do it

BC: X’M NOT DECENT AND YOU AREN’T EXTHER. STAY UP THERE AND PLAY PATTY CAKE WXTH THE BXOLOGXCAL SPECXMENS THAT HAVE EVOLVED XN THE CREVXCES OF THXS FOUNDERXNG SHXTCRAFT.

LL: im gonna do it

LL: you got five seconds

LL: and im gonna be real unhappy if i gotta reattach that door again after i fuckin tear it off the wall and haul your ass out

LL: remember what happened last time galley

LL: only thing tween you adn the rest of the boat for like two weeks was this flimsy fuckin pink ablution curtain with cuttlefish all over it

LL: and mom was all over you like you was covered in roe cubes

BC: SUCK MY BULGE.

LL: do we really wanna go down that road together again brother

BC: SUCK MY BULGE.

LL: five

BC: suck my bulge

LL: four

LL: three

BC: suck my bulge you fuckman.

LL: two

BC: PARDON MY XNSUBORDXNATXON:

BC: ROT XN HELL, _SXR_

BC: x’ll be out xn fxve.

LL: heheheh thattaboy <>

BC: <>

BC: _ughhhhh._

**–lackidaisicalLimpet [LL] has ceased trolling bustedCrankshaft [BC]–**

Snarling, you unhook yourself from your column with quick, vicious movements. This tears one of your ports a little, but you barely notice the sting. Your minder sends you little warning buzz that means you’re pushing it in terms of mutinous thinking, but you don’t care. You resolve to dump all the kitty litter you ordered by drone (on her credit, because of course you did) in her recupracoon next time she’s out swimming.


	6. Elusca: Raid your closet.

There is a dusty box of waterproof journals you keep in your closet.

Lifetimes ago, when the _Carla_ was newer and you had a world of possibilities teeming in your hopeful little six-sweep-old pan, you found a fuckton of these at a market. The vendor was practically giving them away due to some misprint where the pages were numbered wrong. You figured, aside from being neat as all hell, it would be useful to have books on hand that had paper in’em where water droplets slid off the page and shit. You bought an entire box that amounted to roughly 50 notebooks.

At first you used them for little things—inventory, inspection notes, reminders, recipes, stream-of-conscious doodles. You sowed six or seven of the things throughout the boat and the rest of the box languished in some lonely little corner of the engine room.

Perigees passed and you spent much of the dim season towing boats and barges until the night you were unexpectedly laid off. You took on delivery gigs after that, hauling blue-green algae pills for a friend of a friend’s moirail who ran a supplement store out of the back of his hive, or crates of used violins and violas for an ex-ashen bro out west who had plans to re-sell them on the grey market. Some shit you learned not to peek at.

Over the course of one sweep, alone with your own thoughts and a glacial uplink connection, you ended up filling every single one of those fuckers for lack of anyone to talk to.

Sometimes you look back on those times and find it funny in a serendipitous way that you ran out of notebooks roughly around the time you found your moirail.

**Elusca: Read that shit.**

You begin flipping around to random entries:

**5/5/207805**

today mom got a hold of one of my concupiscent devices (the green bulged shaped one what buzzes twelve different ways) and i have no idea how she managed to turn it on but her reaction was fuckin priceless

poor girl she did this weird spasmy thing with all her arms and inked everywhere

and then she crawled off all embarrassed an hid under the thermal hull haha

**5/15/207805**

i was having a really shitty day,

like, I woke up with a stabby headache that never really went away, and then I ran out of hot water in the trap and mom wouldn’t quit getting under my feet. i burned my grubtoast. i got a splinter when i was doing repairs and shit, and then I dropped this giant ass wrench right overboard had to dive in after it

and when I was climbing back on deck, I bent over to get my balance like and my pants up and split

and i started giggling and couldn’t stop

sometimes you just gotta laugh X)

**7/15/207805**

had me a visitor today, this tinyass greenblood dude

they ran a civil flag so we hooked our boats up and talked some

they were on the way back from scorin some sweet shit off of a wrecked cargo ship, like, tons of toys and robots and clothes and shoes spilled out everywhere (some trolls get all the fuckin luck)

they had plans to file the serial numbers off and go sell it at a floating market down south

they was in a trading mood tho, so I hooked'em up with some sopor and some food and a few hours company and after we got cleaned up we swapped schoolfeed modules (I was sick of alla mine, they hated all theirs too, but hey now I'ma learn how to cook all kinds of classy shit!!)

and that’s how i ended up with like five bigass crates of grubpaints, two giant boxes of wind up bath toys, and two of them Mr. Tuber dolls.

I think mom’s shipppin'em black, she keeps bangingem togetherlike

i keep findin faceparts everywhere

fuckin creepy

**7/18/207805**

someday

some goddamn day

i will stop dreaming about that fucking penguin.

**9/28/207805**

sometimes I wake up and wonder how the hell i got this far, ‘cause backin’ up and looking at the past few sweeps all at once, just, wow, how was I even dealing with all of that?

And fuck, I got so much more time ahead of me.

its liable to make a gal feel tired as fuck if she’s thinking on it too much.

but that’s why the Lords made plum wine.

**9/29/207805**

earlier I found this weird place called trollchan

I think it might be some kinda spam site?

**10/3/207805**

man if you think seeing bottlenose blubberbeasts being all randy at each other is gross just imagine for a minute what it’s like hearing what they’re thinkin up close

just

**welp**

**12/12/207805**

I was putting red chili pepper flakes in lunch today and started thinking outta nowhere about good ol goofy Gardue. This one time at Carnival it was raining and we got lost during a walk and we had to spend the day in this bitty old abandoned hive that was about the size of a closet and had a busted gaper in it and a ton of random-ass books about trains and shit

And somebody spray painted this giant dog taking a piss on a tiny little imperial drone hahahaha

it was freezing as fuck in there but we tore pages out of the books and made joints with'em and I couldn’t warm him up any but he said he didn’t care and stayed curled up with me anyway

and then i guess the weed kicked in 'cause he kept staring at this little smile shaped scar under my thumb knuckle and couldn’t quit laughin at it

good times X)

**3/7/207805**

goddamn you ever look at sopor and think “shit i been sleeping in this green stuff all my fuckin life and I don’t got any kind of idea what it’s made out of,”

or stardust, how the hell do they make that shit? is there some factory somewhere that just churns out that stuff all night long and that’s all it does? how the people who work there manage to keep themselves from getting sparked as fuck off that stuff i couldnt begin to imagine

maybe they use robots.

**5/6/207805**

soooo guess who scored eight fuckin pounds of grubcakes at the floating market?

i'ma make grubcake casserole, grubcake sandwiches, grubcake pizza, grubcake waffles, grubcake pancakes, cheesygrubs, grubcake donuts, stew with grubcakes, grubcake gumbo, grubcakes and gravy, grubcake muffins, grubcake hot dish, jam stuffed grubcakes, grubcake gyros, pineapple upsidedown grubcakes, grubcake cobbler, grubcake burgers, grubcakes and dumplings, grubcake sundaes, grubcake calzones, grubcake cookies, grubcake quiche, grubc

**6/20/207805**

okay listen I might not be the shrewdest troll hatched but i can still fuckin _smell_

the next motherfucker what tries to sell me goddamn rancid octopus treats is getting their globes handed to them in a pretty box

that shit ain’t cool

**8/30/207805**

So once a couple sweeps ago I was all to be helping this sister of mine named Dayyah move into a new hive, and we had to get all her shit out of the storage block she was renting at. But it was being dead in the middle of the dim season, like, even the lawnring was being all brown and dead cause of the water shortage and shit-all weather, and we just didn’t know that about half a million giant-ass hairy spiders decided to shack up in Dayyah’s unit, and when we opened the door up they all came pourin’ out in this fuckin’ WAVE of spiders, all hungry and mad as hell. So Dayyah’s flipping her shit, I’m flipping my shit, we’re both doing this horrified fuckin’ dance in the parking lot, when suddenly this cruiser pulls up behind us and I think “oh fuck we’re FUCKED” but it turns out he just wanted to know what we were all to be jumpin’ around like a bunch of fleas on a griddle for, and so we told’im, and then that big brave threshie laughed and went right back across the road and didn’t help us or NOTHIN’. (were it me, I woulda just burnt down the unit and kissed all my stuff goodbye, but she was braver’n me and set off a few bug bombs and I got drunk as fuck ‘cause hearing about half a million spiders suffocating ain’t all that fun, and all eventual-like we made it to her hive and decided to watch us a movie, and who should we see the moment we get to the previews but fucken goddamn _SPIDERTROLL_

**3/23/207805**

so one time at Carnival I up and lost a three hour pun battle

i was short by ONE GODDAMN PUN

“DID YOU _LACE_ YOUR FAYGO WITH IDIOT PILLS OR SOME SHIT, ‘CAUSE THESE ARE SOME _SOFTSHOE_ PUNS YOU’RE TRYINA _SLIPPER_ PAST ME, Y’FUCKEN _LOAFER_ ; IF YOU’D QUIT _POLISH_ IN’ YOUR BULGE TO THE SOUND OF YOUR OWN FUCKIN’ _TONGUE_ FLOPPIN’, MAYBE YOU’D HAVE A CHANCE AT SIDESTEPPING DE _FEET_ AFTER A _FASHION_."

and then like thirty seconds later i realized i coulda won if id thought to include " _SOLEBROTHER_ " on the end there

sometimes i could just kick myself

**1/17/207805**

went to market, got food and water and sopor, did some upgrades

how do other people deal with paperwork and docking fees and registration and all that noise? this shit’s scary i think I’m doin it wrong :(

**12/3/207805**

man so I was waiting in line with my ticket to see if they have anything good at the fruit vendor, and we can’t hear anything the vendor is saying, like, he’s trying to shout shit but nobody can hear him over everybody else?

and this lanky tattooed dude standing in front of me says something about how shit’s gone downhill since the new guy got hired

and I said “Haha yeah, he’s seeming kinda meek, maybe he should grow a pear.”

and he turns around and gives me this disgusted look and I deflated like a fuckin balloon, just, _holy shit_.

**4/13/207805**

sometimes i wonder why anyone bothers getting out of their cupe

Not in a sad way, just

this stuff’s all warm and exhaling little bubbles and everything

and the moons are rising outside

and everything is just nice, all cozy and dark and perfect

how do people leave that and _do_ shit all night?

**5/7/207805**

shit to check:

hull integrity, fuel tank, deck plating, masts, posts, booms, jibs, grab lines, life lines, stay lines, bilge lines, emergency cables, gangways, scuppers, inlets, discharges, side scuttles, uprights, lashings, boilers, piping, bilge keel rails, insulation, steering, lighting, radar and navigation gear, emergency alarms, emergency lights, ventilation ducts, access and cargo hatches, isolation valves, fans, fuel pumps, anchor, chain, mooring system

**6/7/207805**

it’s all I got sometimes, these carnival dreams, my clumsy-ass color gropings, another fucking night another fucking mural, what am i doing, what the hell am I even doing, tell it to me slant my brothers let me hear both sides

am i doing this right

i wear your paints so you’ll know my face when you see me

do you see me

**4/8/207806**

its been so long since somebody touched me I dont even remember what kissings like anymore

**3/8/207806**

fuck i hate being adrift so much I think too much and then i end up writing shit like this it hurts it hurts so goddamn much i just want somebody to listen

**Elusca: Put that shit away.**

You tuck the notebook back in with its brothers. All of a sudden you feel very tired in all the ways except the one that lets you sleep.

You pick your way across your boat, careful to avoid pools of daylight coming through the windows. The engine block door is unlocked, and you take a peek in.

Your moirail has fallen asleep at his terminal again, sprawled in big pink biowires like some skinnyass cranky spider. Tiptoeing past the creaky door, you grab one of the throw pillows you've strewn around the place and tuck yourself up near his shins, where you won't have to touch the sticky tendrils, and let your body relax when he doesn't stir. His toes still have remnants of the last pedicure you gave him. He'll probably kick you out the moment he wakes up, and that could be a few minutes from now or a few hours for all you know, but for right now you can get your cuddle on without duress. It gives you a sort of sneaky joy, and as the fretty knot in your chest loosens you think those lonely times feel farther away now than they ever did.


	7. Elusca: Dream

You sit in a lifeboat bobbing in the middle of a vast and sunny sea. Here, the light doesn’t dazzle you or burn your skin. At the other end of the boat sits Galley in his patchy flight suit, scowling at you. Between you are pots and pots of healthy chard trees, broad, fleshy leaves fanning out to shade your knees, and you know with the natural clarity of dreams that these plants are why the sun doesn’t hurt either of you.

You feel very warm, almost too warm. Galley sits with his legs splayed, arms folded, his chin on his chest.

“You deserve to burn for it, you know.” Subtitles appear when he talks, all the letters yellow except for poison fuchsia i’s. The words don’t feel out of the ordinary to you, so you ignore them. “You always did.”

You smile cheerily. “You ain’t kidding, palebro.” Your words show up too, in pulsing, delirious colors you can’t name.

You begin eating the chard, and once you start you can’t stop. It is bitter and fibrous and exactly what you need, and you eat each tree down to the roots in spite of knowing that if you eat them you’ll be in danger of losing their protection.

“Stop that,” Galley snaps. “Fucking hell, LL.”

“But there’s so many,” you protest and start in on another tree. You think of the Hungry Hungry Wriggler schoolfeed, except the wrigglers never ate fleshy leaves in that module, they didn’t eat leaves at all. “It’ll be okay, bro, we’ll be fine–”

“You moron, you’re going to [cGluZyBvbiBhIG5ldyB3YXZlbGVuZ3RoIGFuZCBmdWNrIGV2ZXJ5dGhpbmcgdXAsIGp1c3Qg YmVjYXVzZSB5b3UgdGhpbmsgeW91J3JlIGZ1bm55IGRvZXNuJ3QgbWVhbiB0aGUgcmVzd CBvZiB1cyBkbw==](https://paulschou.com/tools/xlate/)”

His voice goes all garbled and staticky, like one of your Lords twisted the universe’s radio dial wrong. His subtitles turn into nonsense letters too. There is the notion that you should be alarmed by this, but you aren’t. Galley doesn’t notice and talks on for several minutes while you continue stuffing your face, growing warmer by the minute. Even the dirt tastes good.

You stretch out on the bottom of the boat so the leaves block your view of the sky and throw green shadows over you. Somehow between the time you started eating them and right now, the chard trees have grown much taller; they’re almost as big as you are. You tell yourself you’ll stop soon, there’s a little over half of them left now, still plenty–

“Oh my god. You’re still doing it.You just can’t fucking listen to me can you?” You give him a blank, baffled look as Galley swarms on top of you. “Now it’s too late, you can’t take it back–-”

He grins terribly and sinks his teeth into your neck. You think it should hurt, but it doesn’t, it feels _wonderful_ , a warm, slow throb where his teeth sink in. You fight back anyway for show, shoving hard at him and making affronted noises that not even you believe, because if he sees you liking it, he’ll _stop_.

He doesn’t stop. There is a burning crackle as he pins your wrists with his psi and fucking _mauls_ your neck. You’ve forgotten to keep up the act, you’re writhing violently and making strangled sounds that are anything but upset, and he tears your wetsuit open and bites hard and slow down your thorax. You groan and he starts giggling and licking the places he bit–- _you idiot_ , he’s saying, _you utter fucking idiot_ –-and then he’s tearing holes in you again and _it feels so good--_

He draws back and smiles a yellow smile, and you know even before he shows his teeth that your blood hue has changed, you’re as yellow as him now, and he’s as violetblue as you. He rakes his nails down your chest, leaving yellow lines behind for you to see.

“See? Do you get it now? Now _I_ can’t stop--”

“ _Don’t fucking stop--_ ”

He snarls and then his mouth is on yours, biting your lips bloody. You kiss back like you’re trying to murder him, and he claws at you, growling filthy, vicious things even as his hips buck fast against yours–-hilariously, his subtitles are censored. You’re glowing like it’s the sun in your veins now, you’re _close_ , and there goes one of his hands fumbling down past your wetsuit and scrambling at your nook like he doesn’t really know what to do with it–

And you wake up gasping, the sopor uncomfortably warm. Your bulge has unsheathed.

Well. This is embarrassing.

You tiptoe naked upstairs to the ablution trap. You’re aching so much your knees are weak with it. You lean your back against chilly tiles and regard your treacherous bulge coiling and twisting against your inner thigh. What you're about to do makes your face flush so abruptly it stings, but that doesn’t stop you lowering your hand to your bulge.

This is just to fix yourself, you think, this is just so you can go back to sleep, but the dream is still fresh in your mind and soon you abandon your bulge to thrust your fingers inside you like Galley had tried to do, and you have to muffle your whimpering against the inside of your arm because you can’t stop yourself making noise any more than you can stop the rest of it–

In the old days, you used to have rows that took you from one end of the boat to the other. He called you unrepeatable things, clawed bloody streaks down you and hit and bit and slapped and shocked your hands numb, and you laughed and grinned wide throughout it all and the look on his face had been fucking unforgettable. You remember that first time he hatesnogged you, Galley’s teeth and his weight on you and his invasive yellow smell, his downright pathetic kissing. Lords, that had been the worst kiss of your life, all sloppy and clumsy, but there was no guile in it. He wanted you bad. You could have let him figure you out, let him learn how to be pitch using you like a science project. You could teach him. There’s already so much he knows about you that he could _use_ \-- 

Your spine arches high as your moans turn to short, sharp cries, and your hips jerk wildly as you spill out. You end up biting your arm hard enough that you expect to find yourself bleeding when you draw back to look. You’re surprised when there isn’t any, though the teeth marks are deep enough that they won’t be fading any time soon.

You’re dizzy. You slide down the wall and bury your face in your knees so your hair hides your face and hangs in soggy tangles over your shins.

The person that you’d normally talk to about this is the one person you can’t talk to about this. He was drunk when he kissed you, he apologized, he made everything square, and you just ruined it. He might leave you if he knew. Any sane troll would leave you.

You let the water pelt your tingling, oversensitive hide until it chases your thoughts away.

By the time you come back to yourself, the spray has gone lukewarm. Through one of the portholes in the hallway, the sun is staining the stormy horizon a messy explosion of reds and oranges and the moons are rising.

You don’t see any point in trying to sleep. You take a towel and a wetsuit out of your modus and pick the long sleeved one, even though it’s out of season--it’s not outright hiding a lie if it’s the only clean one you have left.

You put on your paints. You layer it on thicker than normal, until it’s unpleasantly heavy, because if you’re going to look your moirail in the eye later tonight it would be nice if he didn’t notice you blushing.


	8. Elusca: Dream More

You and Galley are curled up together on the deck, which is inexplicably made of soft, firm padding. You are thinking that it would be nice if your deck was like this for real, but you’d get it all disgusting and gross within a night or two.

“Oh hey–” Galley pokes your gills with one of his sharp elbows and points a smattering of greenish yellow stars nestled in a patch of unclouded sky. “Xt’s my constellatxon.”

You snicker. “What, those two? Or those two? Or those two?”

He faceplants your shoulder and makes a grumpy noise. “X knew you were goxng to say that. And here you are, only wearxng one lxttle fuck.”

“What?” You glance down–it’s just your wetsuit and armsocks, like normal. “Hahahahahaha, the fuck are you even on, man, and where can I all be getting s-”

But then you’re not on the deck anymore, you’re in the water and Galley is clinging fussily to the ladder, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. You can count every little knob in his spine–he looks even worse than he did when you first dragged him out of the shipwreck--he's got mottled bruises all over. _Like an old banana_ , you think, and the words appear like subtitles.

“C'mon in, man, you gotta learn sometime.”

Muttering curses, he lowers himself waist deep, both hands gripping the ladder. Every one of his teeth is bared and chattering.

“Good,” you glub, bubbles rushing past your lips. “That’s good, man, just a little more. You want me to help you down?”

“NO. X don’t know how you talked me xnto thxs,” he says miserably. 

"I dunno how I did either. But shit, bro, all I’m sayin’ is you might feel better if you had a motherfucker to all up and hold on to--”

“X’M NOT GOXNG TO HATE SNOG YOU AGAXN, ELUSCA, SO STOP GETTXNG YOUR HOPES UP.”

Mortified, you sink up your eyeballs in the water and watch while he sticks a foot in, testing it.

“C’mon, man! Do it all at once, like you’re rippin’ off an adhesive medical strip--”

"STOP GLUBBXNG UNDER THE WATER LXKE A WXGGLER.”

You bust up laughing and he screeches and launches himself off the ladder at you. But he’s hopeless in the water-–he can’t so much as float, not even in your dreams, and soon he’s all over you and clinging for dear life.

“OH GOD OH GOD, LL, LL GET ME OUT OF HERE, YOU HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE–”

Before you can get a word in edgewise, he lets out a bloodcurdling staticky shriek and spasms all over, and you know instantly what’s happened: a jellyfish tentacle, recently removed from its body but still full of stinging cells, has twined around Galley’s foot. You know this because it happened once before in the real waking world.

The next few seconds are a blur of you rushing him back to the boat, him screaming curses and slapping at you. The second you’re on deck, he writhes out of your arms and reaches to pull the offending tentacle off, but you shout, “ _DON’T TOUCH IT._ ” He freezes up and glowers at you.

“Fxne,” he snivels, all offended dignity, and you instantly feel bad for yelling at him. You see a faint yellow glow flutter around his ankle, and then the tentacle untwines itself delicately before he launches it into the sea.

He grimaces at his foot. The skin is already raw and angry. Grumbling, Galley limps off toward the stairs.

“Where’re you goin’?”

“X plan on lockxng myself xn the ablutxon chamber untxl further notxce.”

“Are you gonna run tap water on that? _ARE YOU OUTSIDE YOUR MIND_ , YOU GOTTA USE SALTWATER ON THAT SHIT.”

He pauses and turns to gape at you, all incredulous horror. “LL, are you goxng to pee on me?”

Him saying that is exactly as funny as you remember it being. You snort and giggle all the way to Galley’s engine room. Instead of biowires, his helmsblock is made out of brilliantly colored scarves, and he sinks into them gratefully.

“Fuck, thxs really hurts.” Galley’s voice is weirdly small and pathetic, and you experience a stabby pain in your guts.

“Just you rest there, I’ll be right back.”

You go to grab the first aid kit and some other supplie--dream logic dictates you need a pad of steel wool, a glass egg, a teapot, and a hoagie among other things--but returning to him is difficult. Your boat stretches out for miles, with endless twisty passageways and more rooms even than Bel’s hive. You keep dropping your shit all over the place, the knowledge that your moirail is in pain and needs you making you increasingly clumsy.

You find him, finally. He ignores most of the items in your arms, staring in dumbstruck horror as you set a pail full of seawater next to him.

You give him a sparkling smile. “Okay, brother, stick your foot in my bucket.”

“NO. WHAT. NO. NO. NO.”

“C'mon, man–”

“PEE ON ME, LL. X LXKED THE FXRST XDEA.”

You’re laughing too hard to answer, and then you can’t because the dream has gone all blurry and suddenly you’re somewhere else.

You freeze. You know this room. You know these pale yellow stone walls. Sunlight streams through windows thrown wide open. In real life they would be too dazzling for you to look upon, but here you’re able to see.

Like you, Cloris has an affinity for color that borders on obsession. Her respiteblock is full of vibrant rugs and pillows and wall hangings. You never told a living soul, but for the longest time you couldn’t stand any variation of yellow because of her taste for golden oak wood, sunny yellow hibiscuses, the amber jewelry she always wore. You hated it like a bad smell, and you hated her for making you hate it.

You glance up, and sure enough, your hands are tied with silk scarves. So are your feet. You’re stark naked on her caliginous platform, a vast cushy mattress covered in emerald pillows, emerald blankets, velvet emerald sheets. Your skin crawls. You never could stand velvet.

Cloris rolls over and tucks herself up against your side, her chin resting smugly on your shoulder. She’s naked as you are, her corpse cold luminous skin without blemish. Her hair is styled the way it was when you first met her in that rainbow drinker bar, short, curly waves framing her face like some kind of troll flapper’s.

She looks at you looking at her, and her lips part in a dazzling smile. Her jade eyes aren’t quite sane.

“Oh, _Elusca_ ,” she croons and runs her nails over your scalp. You flinch. 

“The _fuck_ am I doing back here for.”

She doesn’t answer and continues examining you. When she reaches your throat, she pauses.

“You’ve been seeing someone _else_ , my pet.” She walks long fingers down the bite scars along your neck, your chest. “These aren’t mine.”

“No. We’re pale.”

“You’re very convincing.”

“ ** _FUCK_** you.”

“What’s wrong?” she whispers. “You didn’t like the chard I sent you?”

You stiffen and bare your teeth. Your earlier dream lucidity, the coherency, the feeling of almost being in control of your space, it’s slipping away. “I SWEAR TO MY MOTHERFUCKING LORDS I’LL RIP OUT YOUR THROAT, DON’T THINK I WON’T. You get the hell out of my head or I’ll go and melt every goddamn clock you own, so at least if there’s a cherry tomato apocalypse you won’t goddamn know how long it lasts–”

“That was an impressive amount of babble, darling, even for you. I know it’s been awhile, but _do_ try to stay with me.”

“ **BITCH YOU THINK I’M FUCKING JOKING?** GET OUT. _GET OUT GET OUT–_ ”

“Shh. Shhshhshhshhh.” She giggles and cuddles you closer. “All right, my sweet. I’ll leave you as soon as you answer one question.”

“I am really not drunk enough to deal with this shit.”

“How would you kill me?”

You glower at her and she arches perfectly sculpted brows at you. You think of inky brush strokes. “With salt.”

She tilts her head back and laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, genuine, without scorn. You’re almost fooled. “Ah, and this is why we two fit so well. Salt blood, salt tears, you're so _bad_ for someone like me, and yet I just can’t stay away...”

Even though you know what’s coming next, the pain of it still rocks you. You can’t even cry out as her fangs sink into your neck–you know they’re barely puncturing you but it feels much deeper. It’s a bite that pierces your fucking soul with bright bolts of freezing pain--

She draws from you until you’re sure she’ll kill you this time. She can, easy as anything. You’d never wake up. You feel frail and thin and transparent, full of frigid arctic light. Terror constricts your chest and you gasp faster, clinging to the absurd notion that the more breaths you take, the better your chance of survival.

She parts with a mockingly soft kiss. “Wake up, darling.”

**Elusca: Wake Up.**

You know what went wrong immediately.

At some point during your sleep, your foot hit the temperature knob on the recupracoon, which means instead of waking up in velvety warm slime, your sopor clings to you in messy half-congealed globs. Your eyes are glued shut with it, and you can feel it all up in your aural canals, thick and cold. Sleeping in cold slime always gave you bad dreams.

There is a residual tightness in your throat that means you’ve been sniveling in your sleep. Your first impulse is to down a shitload of alcohol and sleeping pills and pass the fuck back out, but no, the last thing you need right now is to put yourself in a drugged stupor. You haven’t done that to yourself since you first got away from _her_ , during that horrifying time when you weren’t sure whether or not your kismesis was still waiting to torment you in your daymares.

You’d stay up for days at a time, inhaling any caffeine you could get your claws on. You ended up creating your own special concoction: two parts espresso, two parts coffee, three parts melted dark chocolate, four tablespoons of sugar. You called it “Mud”, based on the punchline that the coffee had been _ground_ not too long ago.

When the sleepless days got to be too much, you broke out the wine and the pills and whatever else would knock you on your ass and keep you there. It was weeks before you let yourself dream again, and even then your sleep schedule was so fucked up that it was a miracle if you could even get to sleep at all.

Now you have a moirail who actually cares about your worthless ass, and you don’t imagine he would be very happy with you if you went down that road again.

You drag yourself out of the cupe and into the ablution trap. You reason with yourself while you scrub the stubborn gumminess off your skin. It couldn’t have been her. Ain’t nothing but your pan taking out the trash.

You haven’t really convinced yourself by the time you dry off and get dressed. You put on your face, but you’re just not feeling it tonight: you can’t even make your wicked mask smile.

Your palmhusk is flashing yellow when you plod back into the respiteblock to clean up your slime trail. It pings as Galley sends you another message, and another, and another, and another. Either shit’s exploding or your moirail is in a very perky mood this evening.

There is one thing you’re certain of: you can’t handle either scenario without pouring at least three cups of coffee down your chute first. Stuffing the device in your pocket, you let it buzz and nag at you all the way to the food prep block.


	9. Elusca: Fall in Hate

**SWEEPS IN THE PAST, (but not many):**

You hated Cloris Vhines from the moment you saw her.

It was very, very late in the day when you trudged into that rainbow drinker bar. The place was dark and quiet; aside from a lone someone sequestered in a booth, Cloris was the only other patron. She was smiling, nodding, chuckling, obviously charmed at something the bartender had said, but all the light went out of her eyes the moment she glanced over at you. Her smile grew fixed, her brows lifting in polite incredulity.

You knew exactly why. You were seven sweeps old, dressed in old black jeans and the same grimy tank top you wore to work. It was storming outside, and thanks to your insomniac wanderings, you were soaked to the skin, your paints a smeared mess. 

You could not have been a more blatant contrast to Cloris, who was older, sophisticated, and wore a sleeveless dress of iridescent green silk that naturally drew your eyes to her collarbones and voluptuous curves. A blatantly expensive necklace made from freshwater pearls and silver wire encircled her throat.

And you, you took in her pale smooth skin and lovely made-up face, and how her hair was molded into perfect inky black waves, and you were instantly nauseated with roiling pitch feelings. It made you furious that anyone could be that effortlessly captivating, that she could look at you and it was like being stabbed. You felt sick under her stare, every inch of you self-conscious and exposed.

And then she turned her shoulder blades to you and resumed her conversation with the bartender, as if you were nothing more than a bit of litter the afternoon storm blew in.

Frowning, you found your own table and wrung out your long hair as discreetly as you could. When a waiter approached--somewhat rattled at your appearance, but tactfully silent about it--you ordered seaweed nachos topped with scallions and spicy salmon. The appetizer alone was ludicrously expensive, but what the hell, you'd just gotten your stipend and you planned to eat the fucking things as noisily and disgustingly as you could.

You were surprised when the waiter returned only a moment later with a dirty martini. Grimacing awkwardly, he murmured a quiet, "I'm really sorry about this," before he threw the drink in your face.

By the time you finished cursing and scrubbing your eyes, the waiter was gone. He'd left the empty glass on the table, where you could see emerald green lipstick on the rim. _Hers._

 _You hated martinis._ It was like she _knew_ or something.

And there she sat, behaving as if nothing had happened, serenely eating an olive off a toothpick. Growling low in your throat, you stalked over and grabbed her upper arm, jostling her. She whipped her head up to snarl at you, tipsy eyes tinted orange, and fuck, even her teeth were pretty, straight and white with needle-sharp, prominent canines--

"What the _HELL_ are you--" she began, only to twitch and yelp as you pulled one of her eyelashes.

To your unimaginable delight, an entire false eyelash wing came off in your fingers.

"Huh, would you look at that--" you said, but she slapped you across the face before you could get the rest out.

Whatever reaction she expected, it wasn't your raucous cackles. It was the most pathetic slap you'd ever received, a prissy, wimpy-ass little hate tap--but what absolutely killed you was the fact that she honestly expected it to make you crumple. Cloris lifted her eyes from her paint smeared fingers to your face, treating you to a glare that would have frozen the blood in your veins had it not been _so fucking funny_ , what with her eyelashes all lopsided.

"You fffucking piece of shit," Teeth bared, she slapped you harder, this time with claws, and the lingering sting of it left you momentarily breathless.

There it was, the glimpse of who she could be under all her polish. There was gray on her fingers now as well as white, with a faint smudge of indigo where she caught you just under the eye, and Lords save you, you wanted _more,_ , you wanted to kiss her soft lips all bloody and ruin her flawless makeup with your paints and see just how deliciously cruel she could be--

She saw it too, your hungry recognition, and you were deeply gratified to see her own eyes smoldering. She opened her mouth to speak, and you kicked her stool out from under her. Her eyes widened in panic and her strangled cry was _music_ \--

" _LADIES_ ," snapped the bartender, who you hazily realized had been scolding the both of you ever since you stomped over. "I must insist that you take this behavior elsewhere."

You saw in Cloris a reluctance to tear her eyes from yours as she paid her tab, grabbed your wrist, and dragged you outside.

It was still raining. You made it three blocks before she had you pinned up against an alley wall. Her hair was plastered to her skull and her drenched green dress might as well have been painted on, and she kissed you like she could destroy you with her mouth alone.

No one had ever kissed you like this before. It made your previous little hate flings seem flimsy and stupid, all of them combined didn't even begin to compare to her _possessing_ your mouth like this. You were dizzy and overwhelmed, a sinking dread in your guts warring with the molten fury in your veins--you'd had vague ideas in your head about hate snogging and snarled insults, but now that you had her, you had no fucking idea what you were supposed to do _next_.

Your bloodpump pounding, you locked your arms tight around her and kissed back as viciously as you knew how, moving your hips in wild thrusts as she squeezed and kneaded you through your jeans, and when she parted from your lips and smiled, you saw her face was washed clean of foundation and blush and eyeshadow. She was _luminous_ in the dark, a chalk white apparition, dark brows and eyes and lips in striking contrast against her skin.

She raked those unbelievable teeth right down your throat, over your jugular, and you found yourself baring your neck for her as if it was the most natural thing you ever did. Her hand found its way inside your jeans and you widened your legs, groaning and rocking harder, desperately, as she began doing incredible things to your nook that left you stupefied and breathless--

And all the while, she kept up a steady stream of seething, scathing dialogue, all for you, hissed in your ear over the churning storm: "Good _lord_ , darling, there's even less of you than meets the eye, isn't there? You dull little cliche, you miserable walking embarrassment, you're transparent as cheap hosiery--"

She paused to bite your throat, hard enough to sting but not enough to break the skin, and you clutched at her and moaned as she began leaving more bites, each one more lingering than the last, until at last she lifted her head to stare into your eyes and whisper against your lips: "But you're a girl who knows how to _suffer_ , aren't you? Say it.”

You burst out laughing, and her predatory smile fell away, her eyes glinting with something dangerous that instinctively quickened your breath. She couldn’t know it, but you weren’t being scornful or mocking; you were simply beside yourself at your incredible luck, that this could be happening to you at all, that her breath was falling against your lips and her fingers were thrusting hard and fast up into you. She couldn't know it but you would say anything, do _anything_ , just as long as she didn't _stop_ \--

“ _Yes_ \--” you gasped. “Fuck yes, bring it, bitch, you go on and give me everyfuckingthing you got--”

Sweeps later, you’d look back on what you said and _cringe_.

* * *

There was the moment you realized you were addicted to her, that you weren’t coming back from where she took you. It was a week into your fling. You learned you could overpower her fairly easily, that you could leave tiny fingerprint bruises all over her skin just by holding her fast, but she taught you things about your body that you were never aware of, denied you things you never knew you wanted. 

Cloris liked to talk, and she liked to make you talk while your pan was all scrambled, and every mistake you blurted out kept you in an agony of waiting. She could draw it out for what felt like weeks, making you admit flaws about yourself that you’d never breathe to another living soul. She gave special context to certain words and phrases, to nicknames and touches, until you never saw them quite the same way ever again.

She deeply resented how much stronger than her you were, that you could pin her down and keep her down while you brought her low. She hated your voice, your walk, your language, your sharp seadweller teeth. You ramped it all up for her, deliberately dressing in clothes and patterns she despised, keeping your hair loose and tangled, wearing your paints even though they smeared all over her pillows and linens. 

But more than she loathed the sum of you, she loved your blood color with a possessive madness that rivaled your own obsession and adoration of all hues. She’d make you bleed and marvel at the sight of it--in moonlight, in candlelight, in daylight filtered through dim shades--even as she visibly seethed at the concept that _you_ of all people could have something so precious rushing through her veins.

You didn’t let her bite you for a full week, for all the feel of her teeth made you ache. She was getting greedy, and if she wanted it she’d have to fucking earn it. 

Cloris earned it by tying you to the caliginous platform and slowly slitting the blinds open one slot at a time, so that stripes of intolerably bright sunlight lay across your naked thighs. She was naked too, and she played with herself while you watched, and still you denied her until she made burning stripes up to your neck--and by then she was straddling you and working your bulge in one hand while she nibbled your earfins and crooned:

“My fool, my ocean sapphire, my dim darling, _try_ to understand, I want to mark you, I want to make you mine, forever mine--”

You caved, and she bit your bared throat, and your world exploded in awful, icy pain. It lasted for what felt like a small eternity before it transformed into a wonderful glowing throb that made your resulting orgasm seem like a footnote. It lingered long after your quaking hips stilled. When Cloris finally parted and smiled an indigo smile at you, all sinister triumph, you were reeling too much still to be afraid of it.

* * *

After that, there was nothing you could refuse her, nothing you could goad her into doing. The balance in your romance shifted nauseatingly in her favor, and for perigees she basked in it.

You learned to hate yourself in new ways as you begged and whined. She’d deny you until you cried from it, until you agreed to do whatever fancy vulgar things she asked of you. You discovered new pathetic lengths you would go to get her to deliver that bite--you let her take pictures of you broken and disheveled, you let her put slender emerald studded cuffs around your wrists and ankles that pinched. You’d watch, bereft and miserable, as she hatefucked other people. Sometimes she made you fuck them instead, assigning you humiliating roles and stories.

She drained you until you grew weak enough that even she could pin you neatly, and even then you begged for more. You’d go to her hive dizzy and pale, your chest hurting and your braincase pounding with the profoundly intimate sort of headaches that were beginning to plague you on a regular basis, and unexpectedly Cloris would hold you tenderly and feed you red cholerbear sirloin and stuffed grape leaves with red wine.

It was these occasions that scarred you the deepest, the moments where she was almost likeable. She’d go easy on you, mapping out every inch of you with attentions that edged suspiciously close to flushed territory, as if examining and owning every bit of you would banish any pain or illness she did not personally want you to suffer.

But it would end all too soon--you would say or do the wrong thing, or her mood would change according to some imperceptible whim you could never, ever predict. Her ire would flare to life again, the protective fondness would leave her eyes, and she’d bring you even lower than you were before.

* * *

The first time you tried to leave, you were surprised at her reaction. You’d expected scorn. You’d braced yourself for threats or for cold callousness. You were not expecting Cloris to crumple at your feet and sob. Horrified, you stood there frozen while she clawed at your legs and clung to you and begged you to stay.

You were stupid enough to fall for it. Her overwhelmed relief was too sweet, and she was such a darkly affectionate beauty with you afterward, tending to all the wants she’d denied you without so much as a single sharp word against you. When she finished with you, she slept twined around you like something might rip her away, and for the first time in weeks you felt the rivalry between the two of you tip a little in your favor.

It didn’t take long for things to revert back to the way they were. It became a cycle that reached its zenith every few weeks, and every time Cloris would devise some new method of dragging you back. She was not above pleading with you in public, rain-soaked boulevards, her makeup a mess, her shattered voice rising to an echoing screech. She would show up unexpectedly at your job, at the day block you rented, at all of your after-work haunts.

Each time, it was never her lies or bargaining or blandishments that brought you back--it was seeing her so hysterical. The indignity of it never failed to horrify you, no matter how many times she did it, no matter how clearly you saw through her intentions. She knew it frightened you, and that’s what kept her doing it even though she never escaped unscathed from it either--she knew what it did to her reputation to crawl like this to you, to draw so much negative attention to herself. 

And each time it was always a little bit worse.

Sometimes, when you managed to drag yourself away and lock her out, Cloris would visit your dreams. At first you thought it was run-of-the-mill daymares until they became a bit too controlled for it to be anything but her. You learned to recognize the feel of her lurking in your pan--a little bit like lucid dreaming, but with someone else in control. 

She’d make you dream your breakup in cycles until you woke up looking and feeling like absolute shit. Sometimes she’d hurt you in all the ways you were missing, and when your alarm woke you, the places she struck or bit you would ache sharply in a way that made you miss her in spite of everything.

You always came back. It became a quintessential part of your identity that you would always come back. And for a few nights, all would be rosy between you again; she’d whisper promises against your skin and you’d almost, almost believe them.

* * *

For your first-sweep anniversary, Cloris arranged something special for you.

It had been a good perigee leading up to the event, as perigees between you went. Cloris had begun invading your dreams on a regular basis, and it became a new game to see who could wrest control of it before you woke. Sometimes you managed. Most of the time, you didn’t.

Cloris learned fears that you would have never confessed to her otherwise: primarily, your claustrophobia. She gave you dreams where you were trapped in a small transparent box that she carried around. You would be twisted in some unbearable position, barely able to breathe, kept aware and suffering as she dropped the box down dark, fathomless depths or let you drift weightless and vulnerable in space.

There were daymares where she plucked out your eyes, and when you woke your eyelids were painful and bruisy with something more than just sleep deprivation. It became a regular theme where she’d pull long, disgusting leeches out of your ears, your nostrils. There were dreams where all your teeth rotted out and your bones snapped and broke through your skin like brittle glass. 

Each time you woke up, you learned a new pain--muscle soreness, deep, lingering ear infections, a worrying throb in your gums, sharp, grinding joint pains, and horrifyingly large, dark bruises in familiar places.

But this week Cloris largely left you alone, perhaps knowing that you wouldn’t be functional enough to enjoy her present if she weakened you too much. If anything, she made sure you ate well and slept deeply each day. You weren’t suspicious. It made sense, all things considered, and privately you enjoyed her concern over you. You had presents for her too: chocolates with hot peppers inside, thorny black roses, an expensive wall hanging that was just to her taste aesthetically except that it didn’t match the rest of her jewel-toned respiteblock decor. 

You never got a chance to bestow these nice gifts, because you were stupid enough to accept the glass of wine she gave you. It was the pear flavored weak-ass booze she preferred, a light, delicate vintage that wouldn’t have gotten a pupa drunk, and you tossed it back without thinking about it.

Then your tongue went numb, and there was a highly alarming tingle under the surface of your skin. Your legs gave out and Cloris caught you as you went down, petting you, shushing your panic, smiling widely--

“Now now now, my pet, shhhh, shhshh, it’s all right, you’re going to _love_ this, I _promise_ \--”

When you woke, you were in Cloris’s closet. Your mouth tasted unspeakably foul through the silk scarf tied over it, but the numbness was leaving you, and each breath brought more clarity to your fogged pan. You took stock of the situation: You were naked. Your hands and feet were tied, but other than that you couldn’t detect any injury. The light beneath the door left your eyes aching sharply.

You could hear muffled giggling just beyond it. There were light footsteps, and then suddenly the doorknob rattled and you were temporarily blinded by blazing respiteblock lights as the door swung open.

When your eyes adjusted, you found yourself staring at Cloris, and three of Cloris’s rainbowdrinker friends, each of them as beautiful and terrifying as she was and none of them even remotely familiar.

“Dinner, my dears,” your kismesis said sweetly, and all of you went cold as you realized why she’d been so concerned about your health.

* * *

When it was all over, Cloris dumped you outside at dawn, and you were just conscious enough to hear the door lock behind you.

When you woke again, it was to every inch of you hurting. Everything was intolerably bright, the merciless afternoon sky not harboring even a single cloud, and you could only thank your Lords that Cloris’s hivestoop was an alcove. You curled up in the small shelter it gave you, licked swollen, bloody lips, and opened your Simon Sez modus.

You watched your arms moving while they removed a pair of pajama bottoms and a t-shirt from your dirty laundry pile. You pulled them on. Sadly, there wasn’t much else to cover yourself with, but you put a pair of socks over your hands and wrapped your earfins up as best as you could in a dirty tank top.

All the while, your body protested every movement. You tried not to think about any specific part of yourself too closely. It was unexpectedly easy. You were muzzy enough that at least the pangs felt muted and distant. 

You needed shelter and you needed water. You weren’t going to find either on the hivestoop. Squinting out into the road, mapping out alleyways, you saw spots of shade you could rush to, if you were quick enough. You could escape, you could live, if only you were quick enough.

Against all odds, you managed to stand up.

* * *

It felt like forever before darkness would fall.

You spent most of the day moving from shady spot to shady spot, resting when you could, waking all jangly-nerved with daymares that you forgot instantly upon waking. Your skin flushed purple and grew blisters in places. No one found you, not even when you were rummaging in somebody’s dumpster. You found a half empty jug of grub juice that was only slightly past its expiration date and chugged it dry without tasting it. You found wilted greens, part of a club sandwich, a box of stale grubcakes, taking them all in shaking hands and cramming them mindlessly down your chute, your jaw aching as you wolfed it all down.

When it finally grew dim enough that you could walk into the open without risking yourself, you walked to the first food cart that was open and bought as many steak kabobs as the tealblood vendor would sell you. At another stall, you bought a wheatgrass spinach smoothie and drank it so fast you nearly brought it back up. Taking pity on you, she gave you some orange juice and yesternight’s granola cookies for free, and it was that unexpected bit of kindness that finally broke you. You broke down sobbing, still shoving fragrant kabob meat between your jaws, and she let you sit at her juice bar for as long as you needed while you figured out what to do next.

That night, you found a new day block to stay in, registering under a false name. It had a recupracoon and an ablution chamber the size of a small closet, and that’s all you cared about. You ordered a rotisserie cluckbeast, a large spinach salad, and twice baked cheesy tubers along with the hotel’s strongest wine, some painkillers, and a pitcher of ice water. 

By the time you demolished your dinner, you were on the way to feeling halfway like a troll again. You stayed in the trap for over an hour, letting yourself look closely at your damage for the first time, noticing the bruises and bites, your torn right earfin, the rope burns around your wrists and ankles. You expected to break down again upon seeing them, remembering them, but you felt curiously numb still.

In the looking plane, you stared at the battered person there and it was like looking at someone else’s face. Someone who was horribly sunburned, with bite marks along her jaw under the angry purple flush.

You doctored yourself up with the hotel’s first aid kit as much as you could--fortunately it had a good bottle of burn cream and some abrasion ointment that soothed your rope burns and bites. 

A plan formed in your mind. You would take this poor fucked up troll into the respiteblock and dress her up in your softest clothes. She would drink the entire bottle of wine with painkillers, and with its help and the sopor slime, she wouldn’t dream. 

She could worry about what to do next in the evening.

* * *

A perigee later, you had a tug boat hive and a delivery deadline, but there was only so much wine and sleeping pills you could pour down your gullet. You would wake up thrashing with the memory of her nails raking down your skin, of her cool breath against your throat, and it would take everything you had to rush into the ablution chamber in time for you to bring up everything you’d eaten the night before.

Shakily, you’d lift your head off the gaper lid and make yourself stand up. Rinsing out your mouth at the sink, your eyes would fall on the faded teeth marks spanning all up and down the right side of your throat, and a soft, collapsing despair would creep up inside you and you’d wonder if you’d ever be anything other than the creature she turned you into.


	10. Galley: Acknowledge the Squeak-u.

You’ve always envied how easily Bel seems to fall asleep. You always end up lying there for what feels like forever, cracking your toes and listening to the rise and fall of your breath whistling through your sniffnodes, all too aware of your bloodpusher and your churning guts and your tongue in your mouth and all your teeth and how the hell do ANY of these breathing farting squelching organics ever get any _sleep_? It’s been sweeps since you were hooked up in proper biowires, too far away from your meat to care about it all that much let alone hear it, and you _still_ wonder that.

Right now, the thing keeping you awake is your bladder. You’ve had to pee for at least twenty minutes now, but your matesprit is tucked up against you in a way that feels comfortable and safe rather than suffocating, and you feel too indolent to move.

His face is so sweet and serene that it makes you sort of angry. Nobody has any business being that attractive when they’re asleep, but there he is, long silken hair and plucked eyebrows (you’ve watched him perform _that_ particular ritual some evenings with your face slack in fascinated horror) and you never really found lips attractive before you met him, but his are, all bow shaped and parted slightly. Even after everything you’ve done to each other, it still strikes you as new and a bit startling that you’ve kissed those before. You know how soft they are. How perfectly biteable.

He mumbles something that sounds like “send me hate mail”. You smirk and tap the end of his nose. It doesn’t wake him. 

“Maybe later, darling.”

You untangle yourself gently, tuck the rest of the slime back around him, and tiptoe off to find the gaper.

It’s after you've done your business and washed up that you begin to register the weird piping squeaks coming from the next block. You stand there listening for a few minutes; they’re just soft enough that you can’t identify what they are, but audible enough that it’s like a little jab to your thinkpan every time. After a moment or two, you hear the ominous sound of muffled Lu giggles.

Oh god. You might as well investigate.

The sight that greets you when you poke your head into the rec block immediately makes you squeeze your eyes shut again, as if you could delete the reality of it if you cut yourself off from the input quickly enough.

There sits Lu and your dad cuddled up like tanglebuddies in the corner. The Nuisance, thank god, is snoring in the opposite corner, sprawled upside down with all her little grub legs splayed. Lu is is as naked as you are, soaking wet and smelling strongly of the lake. Your dad, fortunately, does not smell like the lake; he is sleek and dry and is doing his best to snorgle your moirail’s earfin off while...squeaking. 

It is a sound that takes you right back to your grubhood, your dad squealing away like a goddamn barkbeast toy while he attempts to groom your hair or count your toes. You simultaneously hate and adore that sound. It makes you furious that the Empire never removed whatever gland or nodule that was responsible for flooding you with such disgusting nostalgia, but the miserable fact remains that they didn’t, and so here you are, watching your dad and your clown. Part of you wants to throttle them both. Part of you wants to join them.

Lu spots you scowling at them and grins broader, still too full of snorting stifled cackles to speak. Instead, she turns her husktop to where you can see: it’s some dumb little looping vid of someone poking their parrot lusus’s belly, and the parrot squeaking. Every time the video loops, your dad squeaks in response.

“Watch this--” She mouths, then arranges your lusus so that his pointed face is no longer trying to burrow between her party globes. Taking him by the forepaws, she gazes deeply into his eyes like a flushcrush about ready to propose matrimony, and makes a sound in the back of her throat that sounds eerily like a two-wheeled device horn.

Your dad squeaks in response. Lu honks. Your dad squeaks. The two of them continue this exchange until Lu is too breathless with laughter to continue, burying her unpainted face in your dad’s fur as he wiggles back into her lap to sniff at her fins some more. You’ve both noticed his weird fascination with her ears. You can understand it, even as it creates an irrational envious pang in you.

Lu’s eyes are large and bright from behind your dad’s neck as she watches you shake your head resolutely. The longer she watches you, the firmer your head shaking becomes.

“No. Nope. I refuse.” 

“R-refuse what, brother?” 

“You. You and him, squeaking like animals. I am having a daymare.”

“Honk-a?”

“SQUEAK-U!”

“I’m having a stroke.”

“Honk-a?”

“SQUEAK-U!”

“You’re going to wake The Nuisance.”

“Aww, then you better get your bony ass in here.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that we pile with my dad’s face in your tits.”

Lu strokes a hand down his back smugly, and you feel a reluctant sympathetic shiver down your own spine. “Looks like he’s got good taste.”

“You barely have any to take shelter in. Scoot over.”

Grinning her triumph, she shoves her husktop aside to let you in, and soon she has you sandwiched between her and your guardian, both her arms and legs wrapped around you while she plays with your hair and horns in that way that always makes your pan click over into this wordless, dozy place. You press yourself into her petting like an attention-starved mewbeast, and your lusus curls his spine against your thorax, nosing your chin, and you think you could finally fall asleep like this, trapped between their breathing bodies.

You are almost dreaming again when Lu mutters drowsily, “I’m glad he likes me.”

Your dad churrs in his sleep, his paws twitching. You take her hands without looking and squeeze them. “I don’t see how he couldn’t. You’re you.”

Her soft, touched murmur follows you into sleep.

**Epilogue:**

My One and Onlxest Darlxng: X hate your stupxd muscles and your stupxd sexy haxr. And your stupxd perfect fuckxng flawless ass, have X mentxoned X hate that too? Sometxmes X thxnk about the odds of you resultxng from a random genetxc slurry and xt makes me angry because the chances are so xnfxnxtesxmally small and so many factors could have stopped you from happenxng and that thought xs scary.

Xt makes me want to rxp all your clothes off wxth my braxn and bxte you everywhere X can reach so X know you are real and not some xncredxbly pleasant hallucxnatxon. All those pretty blue bruxses. Mm. 

God, X bet you’re blushxng readxng thxs rxght now, aren’t you? X thxnk that’s the reason X couldn’t genuxnely flxp black wxth you. One glare and your face xs a blueberry. Xt’s too cute and X enjoy makxng you do xt too much. Also my mxnder would fry my bulge. 

Or has the blood mxgrated somewhere else entxrely?? Thxs xs a hate maxl, Mxster Kadros, you’re supposed to be feelxng very cyberbullxed about now. 

Waxt thxs was supposed to be romantxc Lu says xt sounds lxke X’m complaxnxng


	11. Elusca: Fondly regard tender moment between lusus and grub.

Watching Otterdad teach Pinkie Buglet how to swim gives you an amusing new perspective on why Galley hates the water so much.

You float on your back in the deeper end of the estuary, wearing nothing but your own sleek skin and grinning up at the moons like you’re sharing a private joke with them. Not too long ago, you left Bel to fiddle with his robots and Galley to enjoy a nap. Where the water would have frozen their globes off, it matches your core temperature almost perfectly, leaving you weightless and serene in spite of all the noise.

Pinkie wails and sends up a storm of dazzling pink sparks as she clings to a bit of driftwood with all six of her prickly legs. From the moment her lusus began nosing her down the familiar hill that led to the beach, she shrieked and clawed and bit the whole way down, grabbing at branches and shrubbery and anything within reach until Otterdad finally grabbed her head in his mouth and dragged her the rest of the way.

It’s not the first time you’ve seen animals teaching their young like this, but it’s the first time you’ve ever seen it done to a grub. None of Pinkie’s antics are anything new to him; he only chuffs at her enraged buzzsaw noises as he pops her free of the wood and pulls her into the water.

_In. IN. You are small, Screech Spark, like smallest of smashing rocks for to open cockles. But I will teach. You will learn the water is not too big, even for offended grub. Watch me._

He moves in graceful twists and rolls, nosing her this way and that, bumping her towards the surface with his head, his paws, his belly. Soon Pinkie is too absorbed in gasping and motoring her legs to attempt escaping.

_Move like last time, yes? Remember, you are apex predator. Water should fear **YOU** , not other way around. Soon you will know._

After a few minutes of sputtering and bobbing like an ablution toy, Pinkie starts a kicking rhythm that has her paddling in circles, her chirps and squeaks of effort ringing out over the water.

_GOOD! Now we dive._

You’re almost as shocked as Pinkie is when Otterdad takes her in his jaws and plunges into deeper water. There is a garbled scream when he surfaces a few seconds later, only to dive under again, up and down, up and down.

_Stop biting, loud bug. Under the water is where the food lives. You see?_

When he deems that Pinkie has had enough, he ends the swimming lesson and lets her sprawl on his belly. Sodden and shivering, she can barely fizzle at you when you swim over.

You crack up. You can’t help it, and you’re going to hell. You grin at her lusus. “Awww, _fuck_. That’s one grub what’s gonna sleep like the dead today, huh?”

Otterdad’s smug snort tells you that was his plan all along.


	12. HAPPY 12th PERIGEE'S EVE EVERYBLOODY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Art by [vastderp](https://www.patreon.com/vastderp))

**Begin Dialoglog:**

LL: Oh fuck bro what could this be

LL: Have you been good

BC: agaxnst my better judgment, kxnda?

BC: oh my fuck

BC: you actually dxd xt

BC: YOU CONCEALED ROADKXLL OR SOMETHXNG XN SOME SCANDALOUS FOOTWEAR. AS A GXFT.

BC: DXD YOU AT LEAST SAY YOU WERE SORRY TO THE MXSSHAPEN ORC AFTER YOU MUGGED XT FOR XTS BOOTXES

BC: DO WE NEED TO ORGANXZE A CARE PACKAGE

LL: naaaahh that ol orc gave it to me he was happy to

LL: i asked him real nice

BC: YES BECAUSE CONSENSUAL FROSTBXTE XS THE "REASON FOR THE SEASON" AS YOUR PUGNACXOUS HARLEQUXN SEX CULT WOULD SAY.

BC: X HAVE TO XNFORM YOU, NO MATTER WHAT XS STUFFED XNSXDE THXS DUBXOUS FURRY MASS

BC: XT XS ABSOLUTELY UNLXKELY THAT BESTOWXNG XT UPON ME WXLL TEACH ME TO HUNT FOR MYSELF. SO GOOD WORK KXLLXNG WHATEVER XT WAS FOR NOTHXNG.

BC: <>

LL: EHEHEHEHE thats ok bro you dont gotta hunt nothin

LL: i’ll put some meat on that lackk of an ass myself

LL: But yeah happy solstice bro <>

BC: try to avoxd gettxng hxt by any comets for the next twelve hours. tradxtxon dxctates wxtnesses wxll put xt xn song form. somethxng obnoxxous wxth a backxng chorus of jxnglxng audxo harassment devxces. crass.

BC: only then can your "holxday cheer" actually become the "gxft that keeps the fuck on gxvxng"

LL: nah my explorin shit what up and falls outta the sky all ended with you my dude <>

BC: are you sayxng that x was a solstxce meteor.

BC: <> agaxn.

LL: nah just the BEST MUHFUCKIN METEOR

BC: does thxs mean there wxll be three foolxsh lowblood peons showxng up to gxve you essentxal oxls and metals to commemorate the occasxon.

BC: waxt waxt WAXT.

BC: you're not mammal pregonante, are you. you have to tell me xf you are.

LL: EEEWWWW BRO YOU DIRTY

BC: there xs no lyxng to the solstxce meteor.

BC: are you goxng to lay a creepy redblood egg all up on my navblock floor

BC: wxth the nautxloxds and your lusus watchxng all gathered around grossed out as fuck tryxng not to reverse gorge. and. a small percussxonxst orphan offerxng to jam the fuck out for the freshly extruced cloacal spawn.

LL: only if you ask nice ;o)

BC: ask nxce? 

BC: dude x'm beggxng for warnxng, x have a sensxtxve dxgestxve mechanxsm and these are pretty good snacks. 

LL: pff they better be good snacks

LL: chocolate salty shameglobes aint all growin on trees broseph

BC: despxte that whole thxng you just saxd there about what they’re called, they are xndeed good.that they don’t taste lxke they sound xs a true solstxce mxracle.

BC: AND LO, THE THREE XDXOT LOWBLOODS DXD SPY THE SOLSTXCE METEOR FLEEXNG LXKE XTS FESTXVE HOLXDAY-CAPPED HEAD WAS ABLAZE AND XTS ASS WAS CATCHXNG, SCREAMXNG 'EW EW EW', ACROSS THE ENDLESS DESERT SANDS.

LL: AHAHAHA XD

BC: AND THEY DXD CHEER AND PUMP THEXR FXSTS, FOR THE PROPHECY WAS SUPER FULFXLLED AND THEY KNEW A GROSS MONSTER GRUB HAD BEEN BORN UNTO THEM FROM OUT A HXGHBLOOD’S FUN ZONE.

BC: FOR WHATEVER FUCKXNG REASON, THXS XS THE "GOOD ENDXNG." WHOOP WHOOP, AMEN. HOLXDAY SECURE.

BC: we can only pray xt doesn't go down lxke xn the scrxptures where the prophesxed horror grub xmmedxately devours the brazen juggalette that just pushed xt out.

BC: would xt be blasphemous xf we changed that part?

BC: denyxng protexn for the prophecy grub. x wxll be fxred from my two mxnute old job bexng a deadly flamxng astral portent of doom?

BC: end up out on the corner of some cxty wxth a cup of credxt chxts.

BC: PLEASE HELP. HUNGRY AND BLASPHEMOUS FOR THE MOTHERFUCKXNG HOLXDAYS.

LL: aw im sure i could rustle the prophecy grub up somethin

BC: feed xt your mom.

BC: she keeps makxng off wxth my goddamn nutrxtxon pump. let her become a more meanxngful part of the holxday feast.

LL: aww she cant help it bro shes got needs just like anybody else

BC: vxle, mostly amusement-related needs. but ok. her nxbs can have my vxtal organ replacxng hardware xf her pxle of squeaky toys and fxdget slxcers have palled. Who am x to stand xn the way of creepy 8 armed progress. they do say xt xs better to gxve than recxeve. 

LL: aww thank you brother

LL: hey you want a grubcake

BC: are there any of the green ones left.

LL: yeah :D

BC: _best flamxng solstxce apocalypse ever._


	13. Cloris Vhines: Float.

You are in a space that feels not unlike the blurry unreality between waking and sleeping where you do-- _did_ \--most of your dream walking. In fact, for a moment, you think you _are_ dream walking: there is the same feeling of bodilessness, of seeing without sight, breathing without breath. But a particular mental sensation that usually accompanies your wandering--the feeling of peering at something from very far away, from a nameless avatar you control from a great distance--is missing. Instead, all of you that ever was is here, in this present fog, and simply floats.

It takes you some time to piece your situation together. Slowly, calmly, you gather wisps of memory and fragments of thought. You liken it to dressing for an elegant dinner: choosing and slipping on a dress, your shoes, your perfume, putting on your rings and bracelets and earrings one by one. You can dimly remember dinners. Chiming glasses, warm, heavy silverware. Flowers. Candles.

The realization happens in a gradual, roundabout way, like trying to grope after the details a lost dream and then snagging unpleasantly on a mental thorn: You are Cloris Vhines, and you are very dead.

This is not the first time you’ve died, but it’s happened so seldom that it’s still an unpleasant shock to realize it. The planet spins on without you, and you are here, in nothingness. You can’t grasp the memory of your last moments--it simply isn’t there. The closest thing you can recall is carpets. You were worried about carpets, and then the whole world went white. That’s where your memories turn to gauze and vanish.

Will you return this time? You’re never sure. You don’t remember how you returned the last time you died, only that you _did_. You somehow found _up_ and _down_ in this white formless void and managed to pull yourself back. But there is no guarantee it will happen again--you might go the other direction and simply wither, the remnants of yourself growing more and more insubstantial the less you struggled.

Best not think of that. Anxiety is good, however: it means you’re still here.

If you focus, you can recall reading all kinds of schoolfeeds on ghosts, ghouls, and hauntings when you were alive, but you don’t remember what anything actually said. There is one certainty: you know you _made_ a lot of ghosts. There is an odd sense of accomplishment in knowing that, of a job well done.

You know they never visited you. Do you have anyone you’d like to visit? It takes some mental gymnastics, but you gather names and laboriously attach faces to them. Darbey. Kelvan. Teylah. Tetrah. Hogann. Lottie. Kitza. All your loves and loathéds, red and black and all of them as dead as you are. No, you can’t visit any of them, not even to gloat. You wouldn’t know how to find their ghosts even if you wanted to.

Elusca?

You examine the name the same way you would an old scarf or a hat you rediscovered in the back of your closet and wondered why you ever bought it. No. In you, the pitch still simmers, barely, but Elusca’s also no longer new, and hasn’t been new in quite some time. You always ever were reluctant to retry outdated things (lovers, fashion, obsolete media trends, it’s all the same) with the exception of bizarre, fleeting fits of nostalgia for certain cult science fiction movies, or a lingering yet reluctant fondness for velvet.

Besides, what could you accomplish haunting a rusty old tugboat? No, best leave her be, for now.

Erskin. That name tears through you like twin bolts of fire and ice. Such sorrow, such joy. He was yours, horns to toes, every piece; he would have fed you his heart if you asked it of him. You bit his throat, his wrists, his thighs. He called you his Lady.

Absurdly, a poem slips into your head, revealing itself to you a fragment at a time:

_I held a jewel in my fingers_  
_And went to sleep._  
_The day was warm, and winds were prosy;_  
_I said: "'T'will keep."_

_I woke and chid my honest fingers,—_  
_The gem was gone;_  
_And now an amethyst remembrance_  
_Is all I own._

You can’t remember who wrote the damned thing. All you have is a frustrated ache in your soul, a sense of having lost something beautiful and wonderful due to your own folly. You should have wrapped him up tighter, kept him _closer_ , but now you’re gone and he’s more than simply out of your reach. You _have_ no reach, no hands, no fangs, no voice, no body, _he’ll stop loving you, he’ll forget you, no trace of you will remain in him, he will move on and live and breathe without you, he’ll REPLACE YOU--_

NO. No, no. It won’t do to be hysterical about what is beyond your control. Best set him aside too; he is of no use to you right now.

Who would still want you?

Mother.

Safety and comfort in chalk white leaves that cradled you. A pleasantly astringent green scent, with undertones of sweet, mellow rot. She, who called you daughter. She, who never harbored an unkind thought toward you.

You can tether yourself to her. Perhaps that’s how you managed to pull yourself back the last time.

**Cloris Vhines: Reach.**

After what feels like sweeps of excruciating mental strain, the blankness around you starts to take shape and form. When your dwelling materializes around you once more, you’re in the foyer. Were anyone to see you, you imagine they would see your transparent specter. From the other side of things, you are still bodiless but everything else is transparent to you: walls, floors, ceilings, nothing is solid, everything is ever-so-slightly see-through. It’s disorienting, but once you get used to it, it’s not so bad.

You drift through your hive. It’s empty of people. It’s also empty of things. The dainty chandelier that hung in the foyer above your front door is missing. Your rugs are missing. The furniture is gone. Even your potted plants are nowhere to be found. The food prep block is the same: No appliances are left, though dirty plates and brandy glasses litter your soapstone counters, and there’s an old puddle of someone’s attempt at an ice cream sundae on the floor, evidence of several people helping themselves to your liquor cabinet and meal vault. Someone who imagined they had a sense of humor arranged your collection of orchid shaped magnets to read **R I P C L O R Y**.

It must have been some party.

The upstairs is no different. Your recupracoon is gone, your wardrobe has been ransacked, and so has all your jewelry. A peek in the adjacent ablution chamber reveals your cosmetics have been similarly raided, as have your collection of luxury moisturizers and horn cream. Your paintings are gone--except for the watercolor self portrait you made one dim season when a long stint of rainy weather kept you inside. You wonder, with a pang, why nobody took it.

Why are you doing this again? What’s the point? It’s all just too dreary. It’s not like making a tally of the things they made off with will do you any good. It’s not like you can get any of it back.

You wonder who made arrangements for your mother, or if she’s still here. You haven’t heard her thoughts since you arrived, but given that it’s winter, it’s likely that she’s still in hibernation. On your way back downstairs, you discover that a trace of you does remain after all. Someone made a halfhearted attempt at scrubbing it, but there’s still an unmistakable jade smudge staining your hardwood floor near the front door. You stare at it and remember a staggering impact that ripped the world away, but nothing more. Mysterious.

Downstairs you go.

The basement door is locked, but you can flow past it easily. You know something is wrong the second you notice withered brown vines stuck all over the stairs in a vain attempt to reach the door. They’re all over the walls too, delirious and haphazard, with no method or purpose to their paths. Your mother’s chamber smells _wrong_ , an old, hideous chemical stench overwhelming everything, with faint mustier hints of mold and decomposition.

It’s like a daymare. Unable to stop, you descend, and there she is, your mother: a slimy brown heap of rotten vines and leaves and the sagging, putrescent remains of her collapsed pitcher cup and hood.

And near the stairs: an empty, discarded jug of weed killer.

It’s a strange thing, having no hands to curl into claws, no fists to pound against the moldering floor, no mouth to shriek with. All you can do is keen and keen and keen, unseen and unheard, your mind on fire. One coherent thought is prevalent among the unbearable cacophony of your heart and soul being ripped to pieces: It must have hurt. _It must have hurt so much._

**Cloris Vhines: Go Away For a Little While.**

You do. You have little choice in the matter; it’s not long before your tenuous grasp on the living world falters and fades back into white again. For a while--minutes, hours, weeks, you will never know--you retreat and shrink into yourself and think of nothing, willing yourself to disappear. You can’t figure out how. You don’t know why you don’t. It’s a strange sort of torture--wherever “here” is, you can’t move, you can’t you can’t leave, you can’t even _sleep_ ; there’s no escape from anything, because everything is nothing except for the glimmer of you.

The struggle isn’t unlike being in a daymare you can’t wake from because there’s some invisible ceiling between you and consciousness, and all you can do is beat yourself against it while the daymare continues all around you. You are an orphan now, unloved and unmourned by anyone, what the HELL is the point of lingering?!

But part of you, the one that you don’t want to acknowledge right now, knows exactly why. It’s the same reason that someone who has fallen off a cliff and into the ocean will continue to lift their head above water, even though their body is broken beyond mending.

You know this: you’ve witnessed it yourself.

There is one thing you know for certain: You don’t believe for a minute that any of the rabble who so rudely used your hive as a dayclub were capable of doing what was done to your lusus. This had to be _them_ , the monsters who murdered you in the prime of your life and took your last love away.

And they were with Elusca.

It always went back to _goddamned Elusca_. The little twit probably didn’t even realize the scope of what she’d caused, and somehow that infuriates you most of all. All of your suffering is her fault, _**ALWAYS HER FAULT**_ and you DIDN’T DESERVE IT and ** _YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE HER PAY_**.

**Cloris Vhines: Make Her Pay.**

You need a body to do that. The last time you died, your body was still whole when you found it again. You can’t remember what drew you to that empty shell of yourself, but you can imagine wrapping life and consciousness and sensation around yourself like a sumptuous mink coat.

But now you have no idea where your body is. You can’t sense it at all, no matter how you stretch and reach with every bit of your livid consciousness. You wouldn’t put it past whoever killed you to make doubly sure that there was no way for a rainbowdrinker to claw her way back to life.

It’s of no matter. You don’t play the sorts of games you play without having a backup plan or three.

**Cloris Vhines: Reminisce on Blunder Sweeps.**

You, like most jadebloods, grew up in a brooding enclave under the presumption that you would forever remain there. As a promising young auxiliatrice with a _Nepenthes ventricosa_ lusus, you were primarily in charge of identifying and disposing of deceased grub bodies, most of which you fed to your mother. It was dull work, but it kept her content and thus, unlike many of your peers who had much more demanding lusii, you had a small, precious amount of time to pursue your own endeavors: when you were not dream walking, you were gardening.

It didn’t take you long to discover that your kinship with plants went further than simply having one as your guardian. They did more than simply flourish under your touch--you could _guide_ them, make them grow in ways nature did not intend. Your results were often unpredictable and strange, but that was part of the fun. After a handful of sweeps experimenting with different hybrid fruits and vegetables, (to delightful and hilarious effect, as you learned after creating a blood lime that made whoever ate it temporarily incapable of lying--it’s a shame it had been a fluke and that none of the batches you grew after ever worked quite as long or as well; you would have found such things _so_ useful later on) you progressed to different potions--and if one or two nosy matrons or tiresome peers happened to quietly expire after drinking your tea, well, what of it?

It was the evening after your third molt that you discovered that your body produced tiny black seeds.

Your mother couldn’t give you much information about them. As time passed, they appeared at random--sometimes four or five plucked from your scalp during the course of an evening, other times only one behind your ear after perigees of waiting. Once one flew out of your nose after you let out a sneeze. Confusing little things. You could find no schoolfeed or manual for dealing with them.

The first few you planted never sprouted--and then you discovered through complete accident after a cooking mishap that they were, in fact, pyrophytic, sprouting mysterious tiny thorny vines after exposure to flame.

You nourished these seedlings and encouraged them to grow. Not all were fruitful, but you remember the night you learned just what grew from them as one of the most important ones of your life. Almost a sweep of careful tending eventually produced a bizarre spiked pod roughly the size of your fist. As it ripened slowly, it turned from a pale, clearish green to a dark, distinctive jade hue.

One impatient night, you sliced it in half and found a tiny pale _you_ inside: vestigial, unfinished, but unmistakably you, its body stretched like taffy and its limbs like stringy tentacles. Its lifeless mouth and eyes were open pits. You barely made it to the load gaper in time to throw up everything you’d eaten that evening. After you cleaned yourself up, you burned the halved pieces--its gunky, rattling scream would haunt you for the rest of your life, you were certain of it--and slept curled up in your mother’s vines for the first time since you were a wiggler.

It was ages before you dared experiment with them again. Bit by bit, you began amassing data. You paid special attention to your water intake and food cravings and learned that a steady, regular diet heavy in protein, calcium, and iron promoted stronger seeds that were less likely to be duds. The seeds were surprisingly hardy once their dormancy broke and they started to sprout. A little soil, a little water, some daily whispers and pettings--as cliche as it was, your plants really _did_ thrive under your attentions--and they practically took care of themselves.

You don’t recall ever imagining that you would ever use your pod clones to resurrect yourself--they seemed too undeveloped and insubstantial to support a soul. But accidents happened in a busy breeding cavern, and you never knew when you would need a new hand or an eye or a leg--and prosthetics simply weren’t your style.

Unfortunately, you never did get to see how your first crop turned out. Someone’s kismesis fling--you never found out whose--resulted in the cavern catching fire, panicked lusii and running trolls everywhere. You and mother barely escaped in the chaos. You lost your life for the first time after you tripped and fell on a stalagmite and woke unknowable hours later with your skin glowing white and a brand new all-consuming hunger.

You ate your favorite work partner, Eudora, who taught you how to use makeup to contour and highlight your features. Poor little thing. You had no grudge against her, she’d only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the future, you would think of her every time you used her technique for applying winged eyeliner.

After your transformation, your gardening fell to the wayside. Part of it was that your body no longer produced the seeds, and you couldn’t very well return to the caves to see if any of your pods survived--that whole area was collapsed now, not even surveillance drones could squeeze in.

But mostly it was that you were brand new, mature, independent, with intriguing rainbowdrinker social circles to explore. You had _so_ much more potential as a social climber and an influencer than you ever did grubbing around in the dirt. It all felt so juvenile and silly in retrospect--a pleasant diversion at the time, but in your heart of hearts the last thing you wanted to be known as was Cloris the _botanist_.

As time passed, you kept gardens still, of course, and decorated your hive with elegant ferns and orchids and hanging baskets. You even won awards here and there that you were actually proud of. But anything more felt too much like work.

And why waste time with work when there was so much _fun_ to be had…

**Cloris Vhines: Take a Risk.**

It’s a stretch. You never looked back the night you left the enclaves. You barely remember its identification number. You have no idea if the caves are even functional, if they bothered to renovate any of it after the fire or if they abandoned it in favor of making a newer, safer sanctuary for their Mother Grub. It’s entirely possible that your pet projects simply weren’t capable of surviving without your physical presence. But it couldn’t hurt to take a peek, even if it turned out that you travelled all that way for nothing.

It’s better than staying here.


End file.
